DuckLabs, the company behind the analytical database DuckDB, is joining Amazon Web Services (AWS). A definitive agreement has already been signed, and the deal is expected to take effect in early September 2026. What AWS is buying, however, is the company, not DuckDB itself. The rights to the open source project stay with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation, and the MIT license does not change.

The Company Changed Hands, the Code Did Not

The first thing worth pinning down is the scope of the transaction. AWS is acquiring DuckLabs, an Amsterdam-based company, along with the engineering team that works there. DuckDB itself, plus the related DuckLake and Quack projects that together make up the so-called Duck Stack, remains under the stewardship of the DuckDB Foundation. The license stays MIT, and users have nothing to sign, migrate, or renew.

Acquisitions often leave the status of an open source project hanging, so drawing that line first was not a minor gesture. The structure that made it possible, with the intellectual property held by a foundation, was put in place back in 2021, when DuckLabs spun out of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. A design choice made 5 years ago ended up serving as the safety valve here.

Peter Boncz, who leads the database architectures group at CWI and sits on the DuckDB Foundation board, restated that the foundation continues to hold all of the intellectual property, and welcomed the commitment AWS has made to advancing open source DuckDB.

A Million Downloads a Day Outgrew a 30-Person Company

DuckLabs describes the reason for the deal not as trouble with growth, but as a response to it. By the company's own count, DuckDB is downloaded more than 1 million times a day, used for everything from ad hoc data exploration to product internals, teaching, and research.

At the same time, DuckLabs spent 5 years as a bootstrapped business, owned entirely by its founders and development team. It grew to more than 30 people in Amsterdam, but a structure that keeps engineering in front is also a structure that cannot easily absorb a large sales, support, and operations organization. Founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt have said they worried their own company could become a bottleneck for the project, and that scaling up a commercial organization would pull attention away from the technical work and the community.

Both will stay in Amsterdam after the deal and continue to lead the team and the technical direction of the open source project. This is explicitly not an acquisition where the people leave and only the name remains.

The Groundwork Was Laid with S3 Tables

By Amazon's account, the two sides have worked together since 2024. The clearest public result so far is the preview support for Amazon S3 Tables published in March 2025.

Andy Warfield, Amazon vice president and distinguished engineer, pointed to how widely DuckDB is already used and liked by S3 customers, and said that roughly 2 years of hands-on collaboration with the DuckLabs team led to this step. AWS holds the data lake foundations; DuckLabs holds a fast analytics engine that runs where the data is being examined. The technical seam between them was visible from the start.

Reaction from the surrounding ecosystem has been relatively calm. Jordan Tigani, CEO of MotherDuck, which offers DuckDB as a cloud service, said Amazon putting its weight behind the project will strengthen the ecosystem. George Fraser, CEO of Fivetran, argued that Amazon can keep DuckDB in its position at the center of a vendor-neutral data stack. Both comments come from companies that build businesses on top of DuckDB, which is worth keeping in mind when reading them.

What Is Still to Be Decided

Some plans are already public. The DuckDB Foundation will add a technical advisory board so that leading community developers can weigh in on the project's technical direction. On the extension side, the stated plan is to open things up so that extensions signed by other developers and organizations can run inside DuckDB. That loosens the structure in which a single company acts as gatekeeper, at the same moment the company is being acquired.

Financial terms, including the purchase price, have not been disclosed. The transaction still has to clear customary closing conditions, and the concrete shape of the combined offering is described only as something to be shared after the deal closes. Whether AWS ships DuckDB as a managed service, or quietly folds it into existing analytics products, is not something the current announcement settles.

Summary

AWS is acquiring DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB, with the deal expected to take effect in early September 2026. The purchase covers the company and its team; DuckDB itself remains under the DuckDB Foundation and the MIT license. The 2 founders stay in Amsterdam leading the technical direction, the foundation gains a technical advisory board, and extension signing opens up to outside parties. The open question has shifted to how AWS builds this technology into its own services.