AWS Agrees to Acquire DuckLabs, the Company Behind DuckDB · Chronopin

AWS Agrees to Acquire DuckLabs, the Company Behind DuckDB · Chronopin

Amazon signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind the open-source analytical database DuckDB; financial terms were not disclosed.^[1][6]
Amazon said it expected the transaction to close shortly, subject to customary closing conditions.^[1] DuckLabs said it would join AWS effective September 1, and later updated its announcement to say the process concluded successfully on August 31, 2026.^[4]
Amazon is not acquiring the DuckDB open-source project: DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack and the rest of the "Duck Stack" remain free and open source under the MIT license, stewarded by the non-profit DuckDB Foundation.^[1][3]
DuckDB creators and DuckLabs co-founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt continue leading the team and the project's technical direction, and the team stays in Amsterdam.^[1][3]
DuckLabs was founded a little more than five years ago, stayed bootstrapped and owned by its founders and team, and grew to more than 30 employees; it puts DuckDB adoption at more than three million downloads a day.^[3]
Amazon says the two companies have worked together since 2024^[1]; the collaboration included DuckDB support for Amazon S3 Tables and Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse.^[3]
AWS plans to combine DuckDB's speed on everyday queries of a terabyte or less with S3 and its analytics services such as Redshift, Athena, EMR, Glue and SageMaker; Amazon Quick already runs DuckDB against S3 Tables, processing over 2.5 billion queries and cutting average query latency by 30%.^[5]
DuckLabs plans to add a technical advisory board to the DuckDB Foundation and to let DuckDB run extensions signed by other developers and organisations.^[3][4]
MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani expects Amazon to launch DuckDB as a service, and GeekWire notes the shift to querying open formats in cloud storage puts pressure on Snowflake and Databricks.^[6]
Analysts told InfoWorld DuckDB is more likely to become an embedded query engine inside AWS's existing analytics services than a standalone "Amazon DuckDB" product.^[2]