A five-year-old company that never took a dollar of venture money is about to become part of the world's largest cloud provider. Amazon has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind the open-source analytical database DuckDB, with the deal expected to close shortly and the team folding into Amazon Web Services in early September, according to Amazon's own announcement and multiple outlets including GeekWire and The Register.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, a detail confirmed across every outlet that covered the announcement, including Amazon's statement that it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly, with DuckLabs saying it expects to become part of AWS in early September. What makes the deal notable isn't the price tag AWS won't share -- it's the reach of what it's buying. DuckDB's adoption has grown to more than three million downloads per day at one point, according to DuckLabs, making it one of the most widely used pieces of open-source data infrastructure on the planet.
Why Buy a Database That AWS Is Giving Away for Free?
The obvious tension in this deal is that Amazon isn't actually acquiring the thing that made DuckDB famous. Amazon said it is not acquiring the DuckDB open source project, which will remain free and open source under the independent DuckDB Foundation and available under the MIT license as it does today. DuckDB's own blog post confirmed the arrangement in blunt terms: DuckLabs announced it will be joining Amazon Web Services as a new subsidiary, with no changes to the projects' roadmap, licensing, or governance model.
That structure matters because DuckDB's popularity was never really about DuckLabs as a business -- it was about a permissive license and a tool that didn't require developers to spin up a server. Written in C++, the database is embedded within a host process with no DBMS server software to install, update, or maintain, and its Python package can run queries directly on data in Pandas without importing or copying it. DuckLabs' co-founders, Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, will keep running the engineering team and steering the open-source project's technical direction, according to Amazon's release.
What AWS is actually buying is the talent and commercial relationships behind the project. DuckLabs has existed for just over five years and grown to more than thirty employees, never taking outside financing -- the founders and employees funded the company's growth through support and development contracts instead. That bootstrapped model, while it kept DuckLabs independent, is also what the founders say they were worried about outgrowing. The company said it worried its own growth would eventually outpace its ability to support DuckDB, turning DuckLabs into a bottleneck, and that scaling into a larger sales organization risked pulling focus from the technical work that made the database popular in the first place.
What Does AWS Actually Want From This?
The deal fits into a broader shift in how AWS wants customers to think about cloud storage. The deal fits Amazon's broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it, giving Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage. AWS and DuckLabs weren't strangers before this. According to Amazon's own release, AWS and DuckLabs have worked together since 2024, and that collaboration already produced concrete integrations -- Hannes Mühleisen told The Register that the two teams worked together around S3 Tables, announced by AWS in December 2024, to ensure they "built first-class support for S3 Tables in DuckDB".
Andy Warfield, the AWS vice president and distinguished engineer who has become the public face of the acquisition, framed the appeal around DuckDB's community rather than its technology alone. "DuckDB is an incredible open-source project with an amazing community; it is broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today," he said, adding that a lot of what made DuckDB successful is that "it is completely open-source and easily embeddable in so many types of applications," and that AWS is "committed to the project's continued development in open source and under the stewardship of the DuckDB Foundation." Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, the AWS vice president who leads its cloud data services, put a sharper point on where this fits into Amazon's AI ambitions, writing that "DuckDB ends up being naturally optimized for AI agents to use" in a post about the acquisition, according to GeekWire.
That AI-agent framing lines up with where the wider data-analytics market is headed. The move comes as the data industry shifts toward keeping information in open formats in cloud storage, where it can be queried directly rather than loaded into a separate warehouse -- a shift that puts pressure on companies like Snowflake and Databricks, which sell the compute and governance layer on top of stored data, and which are both major AWS partners as well as competitors. DuckDB has already been a disruptive presence in that fight over table formats. The project's DuckLake architecture, introduced in 2025, drew notice for proposing an alternative to the Iceberg format that Databricks and Snowflake have both bet heavily on, according to earlier Register reporting on the industry's reaction.
