AWS Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire DuckLabs, the Company Behind DuckDB

Overview

Amazon has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind the open-source analytical database DuckDB, according to Amazon’s official newsroom. The transaction is expected to close shortly, subject to customary closing conditions, and to take effect in early September 2026.

Critically, Amazon is not acquiring the DuckDB open-source project itself. “We are not acquiring the DuckDB open source project, which will remain free and open source under the independent DuckDB Foundation (the non-profit that oversees DuckDB) and available under the MIT license as it does today,” Amazon said.

What We Know

• Amazon “has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind the open source analytical database DuckDB,” according to Amazon’s announcement. Amazon says it expects “the transaction to close shortly, subject to customary closing conditions.”
• When the deal closes, “the talented DuckLabs team, based in Amsterdam, will join AWS,” and Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt — who created DuckDB and co-founded DuckLabs — “will continue leading the team and the open source project’s technical direction,” Amazon said.
• DuckDB, along with the related DuckLake and Quack projects, will “remain free and open source under the MIT license, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing its stewardship of the projects,” according to DuckLabs.
• Peter Boncz, a DuckDB Foundation board member, said the foundation “holds all IP of open-source DuckDB, and will continue to do so” following the transaction, according to the DuckLabs announcement.
• DuckLabs was founded “a little more than five years ago” as a bootstrapped, founder-owned company and grew to “more than 30 employees in Amsterdam,” according to DuckLabs’ press release. DuckDB now runs at “more than three million downloads a day,” the company said in the same release.
• Andy Warfield, Amazon vice president and distinguished engineer, said in a statement that AWS has “been working closely with the DuckLabs team for the past two years,” adding that DuckDB “is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today,” according to Amazon.
• Hannes Mühleisen, DuckLabs co-founder and CEO, said, “Joining AWS gives our team the opportunity to build for a much larger audience while continuing to invest in the open-source ecosystem around and including DuckDB,” according to DuckLabs’ press release.
• DuckLabs plans to expand the DuckDB Foundation’s role by establishing “a technical advisory board, so that leading community members can provide their input on the project’s technical direction,” and to “open the extension stack so that extensions signed by other developers and organizations can run in DuckDB,” according to DuckLabs.
• Outside voices weighed in on the deal: MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani said “Amazon putting its weight behind DuckDB is going to add a ton of momentum and strengthen the ecosystem,” while Fivetran CEO and co-founder George Fraser said, “Amazon is the ideal home for DuckLabs,” both according to DuckLabs’ announcement.

What We Don’t Know

• Neither Amazon nor DuckLabs has disclosed financial terms of the acquisition.
• Amazon and DuckLabs have each described a different length of prior collaboration in their respective announcements, so the precise starting point of the AWS-DuckLabs relationship is not clearly established beyond “roughly two years,” the framing used in Warfield’s quoted statement.
• Amazon said “nothing changes for DuckDB users” in the meantime, but has not detailed how DuckLabs’ commercial support and feature-development partnerships — the business that funded the bootstrapped company until now — will operate once folded into AWS.

Analysis

The deal marks a shift in how one of open source’s fastest-growing data tools is funded and governed. DuckDB, an embeddable, in-process analytical database often compared to SQLite for analytics workloads, has become widely used for local data exploration and as a building block inside larger data platforms. As previously reported, the DuckDB team has continued active technical development on the engine, including a preview of version 2.0 codenamed “Cyanoptera” that replaces its Postgres-derived SQL parser.

The structure Amazon and DuckLabs settled on — acquiring the commercial company while routing the open-source project’s intellectual property through an independent nonprofit foundation — mirrors a pattern other large cloud providers have used to acquire open-source-adjacent businesses without appearing to take direct ownership of a community project’s code and trademarks. Whether that separation holds up in practice, particularly around governance of the newly planned technical advisory board and the opened extension ecosystem, will depend on details DuckLabs said it will share “as those plans develop.”