Amazon to Acquire DuckLabs, the Startup Behind Open-Source DuckDB

Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind the open-source analytics database DuckDB, the company said in an announcement this week. The deal adds one of the fastest-growing names in data-analytics software to Amazon Web Services, though the companies were careful to draw a line between the business being bought and the open-source project it built.

DuckDB is an in-process, "OLAP" analytical database that has become popular with data engineers and analysts for its speed and simplicity — it runs embedded inside an application rather than requiring a separate database server, and it has become a common building block in modern data pipelines. It is distributed under the permissive MIT license.

Under the terms described by both sides, Amazon is acquiring DuckLabs the company and its engineering team, not the DuckDB open-source project itself. In a joint blog post, AWS said DuckDB, along with the related DuckLake and Quack projects, "will remain free and open source under the independent DuckDB Foundation" and continue to be available under the MIT license as it is today. Peter Boncz, who leads the database research group at Amsterdam's Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and sits on the DuckDB Foundation's board, said the foundation was created specifically to hold that intellectual property when DuckLabs first spun out of the research institute. "I am delighted that AWS is committed to keep advancing open-source DuckDB," Boncz said, according to DuckLabs' own announcement.

DuckDB's creators, Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, will join AWS along with the rest of the DuckLabs team once the transaction closes, which the company said it expects to happen in early September pending customary conditions. Both founders are expected to continue steering the open-source project's technical direction from inside Amazon, extending a partnership between AWS and DuckLabs that dates to 2024. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

DuckDB has grown quickly since its academic origins at CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science, in part because it lets analysts run fast, complex queries directly on a laptop or inside an application without standing up a full database server or cluster. That design has made it a favorite building block for smaller data teams and for other startups building analytics products on top of it, several of which have built businesses that depend on the project remaining open and independently governed.

Andy Warfield, an Amazon vice president and distinguished engineer, framed the deal as a cultural as much as a technical fit, saying the DuckLabs team's mission of helping people work confidently with their data closely tracks AWS's own approach to building data tools. Amazon said the goal is to make analytics on AWS "faster, simpler, and more cost-effective" by folding DuckDB's engine more deeply into its cloud services, while emphasizing that current DuckDB users will see no changes during the transition period before the deal closes.

The acquisition lands amid a broader scramble among cloud providers to control pieces of the open-source data-tooling stack that increasingly underpins enterprise analytics, a dynamic trade press coverage has flagged as a source of anxiety inside open-source communities wary of corporate ownership creeping into projects they rely on. The DuckDB Foundation has said it plans to add an outside technical advisory board to give independent contributors a formal voice in the project's direction, and the team has discussed opening up DuckDB's extension architecture so software signed by other developers and organizations can run inside the database, according to analysis from MotherDuck, a company built on top of the DuckDB engine.

Whether those governance commitments hold will likely shape how the DuckDB community responds to its creators' move inside one of the industry's largest cloud providers. Similar acquisitions elsewhere in the data-infrastructure world in recent years have prompted open-source maintainers to change licensing terms after joining a large vendor, making the DuckDB Foundation's independent control over the project's intellectual property a detail that outside developers and rival cloud providers alike are expected to watch closely as the deal moves toward closing.