AWS Acquires DuckLabs, DuckDB Stays Open Source Under MIT License

DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind the analytics database DuckDB, has announced that it will join Amazon Web Services. The move was expected to be effective on September 1; an update added to the announcement says the process concluded successfully on August 31, 2026.

The team will remain together in Amsterdam and continue working on DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack and the community around them. The announcement was signed by founders Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen.

The open-source core stays in place

DuckDB and the other open-source components of what the company calls the “Duck Stack” will remain free and open source under the MIT license. Stewardship of the projects stays with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation, which holds the intellectual property of open-source DuckDB.

“As the CWI representative on the DuckDB Foundation, I would like to congratulate Hannes, Mark and all DuckLabs employees with this new chapter,” said foundation board member Peter Boncz of CWI Amsterdam, adding that the foundation will keep making sure the voices of the community are heard.

From a bootstrapped company to a million downloads a day

DuckLabs was founded a little over five years ago as a bootstrapped company fully owned by its founders and its development team, after the team declined venture capital. It has grown into a team of more than 30 people in Amsterdam, and DuckDB now records more than one million downloads every day.

The founders say the limits of that model became clear over time: rapid growth risked outpacing what a small company could support, while scaling a large sales, support and operations organisation would pull attention away from the technical work and the community that made DuckDB successful. DuckLabs and AWS had already been working closely together for more than a year.

What AWS says, and what comes next

Andy Warfield, a distinguished engineer and vice president at AWS, said DuckDB “is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today” and called the DuckLabs team one of the most technically deep and high-velocity teams he has worked with.

The DuckDB Foundation is to add a technical advisory board so that leading community members can provide input on the project’s technical direction, and the extension stack is to be opened so that extensions signed by other developers and organisations can run in DuckDB. The two companies plan to use DuckDB, DuckLake and Quack to help power a new generation of data services.