DuckLabs

Cloud Infrastructure · Databases · Developer Tools

Acquisition

AWS agrees to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB

The open-source database stays free under a nonprofit foundation, but its creators and engineering team now work for a cloud giant.

• Amazon has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind the open-source analytics database DuckDB, with the deal expected to close in early September 2026.
• DuckDB is an in-process OLAP database that runs embedded inside applications rather than as a separate server, letting tools query data directly without a heavy data warehouse setup.
• Founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who created DuckDB out of research at Amsterdam's CWI institute, will join AWS and continue leading the team and the project's technical direction from Amsterdam.
• AWS says it is not acquiring the open-source project itself: DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack remain free under the MIT license, governed by the independent nonprofit DuckDB Foundation.
• DuckLabs was bootstrapped for just over five years with no outside venture funding, grew to more than 30 employees, and says DuckDB now sees over three million downloads a day.
• AWS and DuckLabs had already been collaborating since 2025 on DuckDB support for Amazon S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse, ahead of the acquisition.
• The deal deepens AWS's push to make S3 a place customers query data directly rather than load it into a separate warehouse, a shift that pressures partners-turned-competitors like Snowflake and Databricks.
• By owning DuckDB's core team while keeping it open source, AWS gains deep influence over a tool increasingly seen as a natural fit for AI agents that query and explore data the way people do.