Shortfacts - March 2018
SAP strengthens innovation location France
SAP plans to invest over 150 million euros annually in research and development in France over the next five years. Among other things, SAP is taking over the Paris-based start-up Recast.AI.
France is increasingly becoming an important hub for innovation for SAP. There are plans to open the second SAP.iO Foundry location in Europe. This will give more than 50 start-ups access to mentoring, technology and the dynamic SAP partner network.
The SAP.iO fund invests in French start-ups in its first financing round. SAP will invest 150 million euros annually in research and development over the next five years.
With the acquisition of Recast.AI, SAP intends to further expand the machine learning (ML) functions in Leonardo and plans to spend up to two billion euros in total over the next five years as a sign of its commitment to France.
The aim is to accelerate the company's rapid growth in the cloud and expand technology partnerships with a focus on ML, blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
This step is an expression of SAP's global strategy to turn companies into "intelligent enterprises". SAP will focus on start-ups that develop complementary solutions to SAP Leonardo.