Amazon’s AWS Agrees to Acquire DuckLabs to Expand Analytics Capabilities
Key Takeaways
- •Amazon said it has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, and the transaction is expected to close by early September subject to customary conditions.
- •The DuckLabs engineering team will join AWS, while co-founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt will continue leading the team and the project’s technical direction.
- •Amazon is not acquiring DuckDB itself, and DuckDB will remain free and independently governed by the DuckDB Foundation under the MIT license.
- •DuckLake and Quack are also excluded from the acquisition and will remain under DuckDB Foundation governance.
- •AWS said the deal is aimed at improving its analytics products by adding DuckLabs’ database engineering expertise, while existing DuckDB users will see no change.
Amazon has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind the open-source analytical database DuckDB. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Today, @ducklabs_com is joining @awscloud . The move is expected to be completed by early September.
Joining AWS gives DuckLabs the resources and reach to bring DuckDB, DuckLake, and the Quack protocol to many more developers and organizations – and to pursue ideas at a scale… pic.twitter.com/RtiNhsOSHq
— DuckDB (@duckdb) August 26, 2026
The deal will bring the DuckLabs engineering team into AWS. Co-founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who created DuckDB together, will continue leading the team and the open-source project’s technical direction after the transaction closes.
Amazon said it is not acquiring DuckDB itself. The open-source project will remain free and independently governed by the DuckDB Foundation, a non-profit, under the MIT license. DuckLake and Quack are also excluded from the acquisition and will remain under the DuckDB Foundation’s governance.
“Joining AWS gives us the resources and reach to bring this technology to many more developers and organizations,” Mühleisen and Raasveldt wrote on the company’s website.
AWS and DuckLabs have worked together since 2024, making this acquisition a deeper extension of an existing relationship rather than a first-time partnership. That matters for AWS customers because the announcement centers on integrating DuckLabs’ database engineering expertise into AWS analytics offerings while keeping the core open-source projects separate.
Andy Warfield, Amazon vice president and distinguished engineer, said DuckLabs has a record of building software that developers genuinely love.
“I find that sentiment, not just making data easy to work with, but actively empowering people to ask questions, build, and really innovate with data, is exactly in line with how AWS and our customers think about data,” Warfield said.
Amazon said the goal of the acquisition is to make AWS analytics faster, simpler, and more cost-effective for customers. The company described the DuckLabs team as bringing “world-class database engineering expertise” that AWS intends to apply to its analytics offerings.
The DuckLabs team is based in Amsterdam and will remain there after joining AWS, according to the announcement.
Amazon said it expects the transaction to close shortly, subject to customary closing conditions. Once the deal is completed, the company plans to share more detail on how the two teams will work together.
Amazon also emphasized that nothing changes for existing DuckDB users. The project will continue under its current open-source framework, and the company said the broader DuckDB ecosystem will remain free and open-source under independent governance.
