AWS to Acquire DuckLabs, Team Behind DuckDB; Project to Remain Open Source

Amazon Web Services has signed a deal to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company behind the DuckDB database, while leaving the DuckDB open-source project itself under independent control. Amazon said Tuesday that DuckDB will remain free and open source under the DuckDB Foundation and continue to be available under the MIT license.

Amazon said AWS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs and expects the transaction to close shortly, subject to customary closing conditions. It did not disclose a purchase price or give an exact closing date. When the deal closes, the DuckLabs team in Amsterdam will join AWS, according to Amazon’s announcement.

Amazon said DuckDB co-creators and DuckLabs co-founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt will continue leading the team and the open-source project’s technical direction. The company also said AWS and DuckLabs “have worked together since 2024.” In the announcement, Amazon executive Andy Warfield said the DuckDB team’s focus on helping people work with data “is exactly in line with how AWS and our customers think about data.”

DuckDB is a high-performance analytical database designed to be embedded directly into applications, rather than run as a separate database server. It has become widely used in data science and analytics work, including local analysis and querying data stored in cloud object storage, helping explain why AWS would want the team behind it alongside existing analytics products such as Athena and Redshift. DuckLabs said in a May 27 post that DuckDB was seeing more than 1 million downloads per day.

Amazon was explicit that the acquisition target is DuckLabs, not the DuckDB project itself. That distinction matters because DuckDB is governed by the DuckDB Foundation, a Dutch nonprofit set up to safeguard the project’s independence and keep it under the permissive MIT license. DuckDB began as a research project at CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science in Amsterdam, and was created by Mühleisen and Raasveldt. Amazon disclosed no purchase price and did not announce any specific product plans.