DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based team behind the analytical database DuckDB, is joining AWS. The acquisition is set to take effect in early September 2026. DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack will remain open source under the MIT license, and the DuckDB Foundation will continue to manage the projects.
The team will continue to work in Amsterdam and will carry on developing DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and the rest of the ecosystem. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
DuckLabs has existed for just over five years and has grown to more than thirty employees. The company was never financed with external capital. The founders and employees remained the sole owners and funded the company’s growth through support and development contracts. According to DuckLabs, DuckDB is now downloaded more than three million times a day.
Its roots lie at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science ( CWI ) in Amsterdam, where DuckDB originated as a CWI spin-off. That same CWI team subsequently partnered with MotherDuck, which at the time raised $47.5 million for a cloud service based on DuckDB.
The partnership has been in place since 2025
AWS and DuckDB have been working together since early 2025, including on DuckDB support for Amazon S3 Tables and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse. Andy Warfield, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, speaks of about two years of close collaboration with Mark Raasveldt, Hannes Mühleisen, and their team.
Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO of DuckLabs, said of the acquisition: “AWS brings the scale and reach to introduce this technology to many more users, including people who may eventually rely on the Duck Stack without needing to operate a database themselves.”
What will change for open source?
DuckLabs aims to expand the role of the DuckDB Foundation. DuckLabs will establish an advisory board where commercial users can provide input on the roadmap. The team also wants to make the extension ecosystem more open, so that DuckDB extensions signed by other developers and organizations can run.
This will eliminate the commercial pressure to convert free users into paying support customers. According to the team, this will give them more room for contributors, integrations, and use cases outside the existing partner network.
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