AWS Acquires DuckLabs: Expanding the Horizon of the "Duck Stack"

By Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen
Published: 2026-08-26 | Reading Time: ~10 min

We are thrilled to announce that DuckLabs will be joining Amazon Web Services (AWS). This transition is slated to become official in early September.

Our dedicated team will remain based in Amsterdam, where we will continue our development of DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and our engagement with the wider developer community.

By integrating with AWS, we gain the immense resources and global reach necessary to deliver our technology to a far larger audience of organizations and developers. This move allows us to explore ambitious ideas at a scale that would have been nearly impossible to achieve as an independent entity.

The Core Promise: Open Source Integrity

Crucially, the fundamental nature of our work will not change. The "Duck Stack" will remain accessible to everyone.

The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation will continue to act as the steward for these projects, ensuring they remain free and open. While this concludes one proud chapter of our history, it opens a new one that we believe will propel DuckDB to unprecedented heights.

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Reflecting on Our Journey

Roughly five years ago, we established DuckLabs to provide a permanent, stable home for the DuckDB team. At the time, we were facing a crossroads: commercial interest was spiking and venture capitalists were knocking.

We decided to ignore the traditional VC route and instead built a bootstrapped founder-and-team-owned company. This autonomy allowed us to:

• Prioritize technical excellence over rapid monetization.
• Build the technology patiently.
• Maintain a clear vision of our original goals.

What started as a small group focused on an ambitious open-source goal evolved into a team of over 30 professionals in Amsterdam. We've watched with pride as developers globally used DuckDB for research, education, product development, and data exploration in ways we never could have predicted.

The Scaling Challenge

Despite our success, the limitations of our independent model became apparent. We feared that:

1. The growth of DuckDB would eventually exceed our capacity to support it.
2. DuckLabs might become a bottleneck for the very ecosystem it helped create.
3. Expanding into a massive sales and operations machine would distract us from the technical innovation and community focus that defined our success.

To reach a broader demographic—including those who don't explicitly seek out an analytical database—we need deeper infrastructure and industry-specific solutions. We believe the potential for the DuckDB revolution is massive, potentially growing by: $\text{Growth} \approx 10^2 \times \text{Current Scale}$

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Why AWS?

DuckLabs and AWS have maintained a close collaborative relationship for over a year. This period allowed us to test our synergy and realize the potential of combining our technical depth with AWS's massive scale.

Our goal is to ensure the "Duck Stack" powers the next generation of data services, whether users interact with it directly or encounter it seamlessly within other AWS products. For our team, this means more space to tackle "hard problems" and think bolder.

"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 whole team at DuckLabs I’m excited at the opportunity to help the project have an even broader impact. Also, and maybe a little selfishly, I’ve found the DuckLabs 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 get to do a lot more of that."

— Andy Warfield, Distinguished Engineer and Vice President, AWS

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What Stays the Same?

We understand that acquisitions raise concerns. We want to be explicit about our commitments to the community:

• MIT License: DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack remain free and open source.
• Governance: The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continues to hold the IP.
• Location: The team stays together in Amsterdam.
• Community: The projects will continue to serve all users, vendors, and contributors.

The transparency and openness that fueled our growth are non-negotiable.

"As the CWI representative on the DuckDB Foundation, I would like to congratulate Hannes, Mark and all DuckLabs employees with this new chapter. When DuckLabs spun out of CWI, we created this foundation, which holds all IP of open-source DuckDB, and will continue to do so. I am delighted that AWS is committed to keep advancing open-source Duck..."

To illustrate the continued commitment to the code, here is a conceptual look at how the community can still contribute via the standard flow:

# Example: Contributing to the open source project
git clone https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb
cd duckdb
make
./build/release/duckdb -c "SELECT 'The community still drives the code!';"

We are deeply grateful for the trust you have placed in us, and we look forward to this next chapter.