Transaction brings together DuckLabs and AWS to expand the reach of DuckDB-powered data services and preserve open-source projects and Foundation stewardship
DuckLabs, the development team behind DuckDB, will become part of Amazon Web Services (AWS), expected to be effective early September 2026.
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”
— Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO at DuckLabs
The DuckLabs team will remain in Amsterdam and continue developing DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and the wider DuckDB ecosystem.
DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and the other open-source components of the ecosystem will remain free and open source under their existing MIT licenses. The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation will continue its stewardship of the projects.
Hannes Mühleisen, co-founder and CEO at DuckLabs, said, “Over the past five years, DuckDB has grown from an ambitious open-source project into technology used by developers and organizations around the world. 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.”
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By joining AWS, the team will gain access to additional resources, infrastructure, and customer reach as it works to bring DuckDB-powered technology to more developers and organizations.
Andy Warfield, vice president and distinguished engineer at AWS, said: “DuckDB is an incredible open-source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today. After about two years of working closely with Mark, Hannes and the team at DuckLabs, I’m excited by the opportunity to help the project have an even broader impact. A lot of what has made DuckDB so successful is the fact that it is completely open source and easily embeddable in so many types of applications. We are committed to the project’s continued development in open source and under the stewardship of the DuckDB Foundation. I’ve found the Duck team to be one of the most technically deep, humble, and high-velocity teams that I’ve ever had a chance to work with, and I’m delighted that we will get to do a lot more of that.”
Builds on an existing collaboration
DuckLabs and AWS have been collaborating since early 2025, including on DuckDB support for Amazon S3 Tables and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse. That work showed both teams how DuckDB’s embedded analytical capabilities could support a broader generation of data products and services. The transaction will allow DuckLabs and AWS to deepen that collaboration and reach users across a wider range of industries and technical environments.
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“We have seen what the DuckLabs and AWS teams can accomplish together,” Hannes Mühleisen added. “AWS brings the scale and reach to introduce this technology to many more users, including people who may eventually rely on the Duck stack without needing to operate a database themselves.”
Continued investment in open source
DuckLabs expects the transaction to create additional opportunities to invest in DuckDB and its open-source community. The company plans to expand the role of the DuckDB Foundation, including establishing an advisory board through which commercial users can provide input on the project roadmap. DuckLabs also plans to make the extension community more open by enabling DuckDB to run extensions signed by other developers and organizations.
Following the transaction, DuckLabs will no longer depend on converting users of its free software into commercial support customers. The team expects this to give it greater freedom to support a wider range of open-source users, contributors, integrations, and use cases.
The DuckLabs team will share further details about Foundation governance, the extension ecosystem, existing partnerships, and its technical roadmap as those plans develop.
Five years of DuckLabs
DuckLabs was founded a little more than five years ago as a long-term operating home for the development team behind DuckDB, the high-performance analytical database. The company chose a bootstrapped model and remained fully owned by its founders and team members, financing its growth through feature-development and support partnerships.
That model enabled DuckLabs to grow to more than 30 employees in Amsterdam. Over the same period, DuckDB adoption grew to more than three million downloads per day, according to DuckLabs.
As adoption increased, DuckLabs saw opportunities to apply its technology to more specialized problems and serve organizations beyond the highly technical partners supported by its existing business model. Joining AWS will give the team the resources and reach to pursue those opportunities without having to rebuild DuckLabs as a substantially different organization.
