Amazon has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind the open-source columnar database DuckDB. The acquisition brings the DuckLabs development team into Amazon Web Services (AWS), where they will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary starting in early September. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
DuckDB creators and DuckLabs co-founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt will continue leading the team from Amsterdam, maintaining responsibility for the project's technical roadmap. Amazon confirmed that the core DuckDB open-source project, along with related initiatives DuckLake and Quack, will remain free and open source under the MIT license, governed by the independent nonprofit DuckDB Foundation.
Architectural Fit for Cloud Storage and AI Agents
DuckDB operates as an embedded analytical database engine, designed to execute fast vectorized SQL queries directly against columnar data formats without requiring dedicated database cluster infrastructure. In recent years, DuckLabs collaborated with AWS to optimize DuckDB execution against Amazon S3 Tables and SageMaker Lakehouse environments.
The acquisition reflects a strategic shift across enterprise cloud data infrastructure toward in-place analytics over object storage, reducing the necessity of loading data into separate cloud data warehouses. AWS Vice President of Cloud Data Services Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec stated that DuckDB's lightweight execution model aligns naturally with AI agent workflows, which frequently run exploratory queries and test localized data subsets during reasoning tasks.
Foundation Governance and Ecosystem Dynamics
DuckLabs operated for over five years without venture capital funding, scaling to more than 30 employees supported by technical support and development contracts. In a statement on the acquisition, the founders noted that the rapid growth of the project created scaling demands that risked diverting engineering resources toward corporate operations.
Under the new arrangement, the DuckDB Foundation will introduce a technical advisory board to preserve community governance over the project's direction. Additionally, cloud analytics partner MotherDuck, which provides a managed service on top of DuckDB, confirmed it will begin offering direct enterprise support for DuckDB implementations with the endorsement of the DuckLabs founders.
The upcoming DuckDB 2.0 release, scheduled for later this year, introduces Quack to enable networked query distribution between DuckDB instances alongside enhanced query performance over object storage.
