DuckLabs announced it will join Amazon Web Services (AWS), effective in early September, in a move designed to scale the company’s open-source database projects to a broader audience.
The Amsterdam-based team, which has grown to more than 30 people over five years, will remain together and continue developing DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and related projects. According to the announcement, DuckDB now receives more than one million downloads daily and is used by developers globally for data exploration, product development, research, and system building.
Crucially, DuckDB and other open-source components of the “Duck Stack” will remain free and open source under the MIT license. The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation will continue overseeing these projects, and the DuckLabs team will keep contributing to the open-source work.
DuckLabs was founded just over five years ago as a bootstrapped, founder-owned company to provide a stable home for the DuckDB project. The founders noted that while the project gained significant momentum, they grew concerned that scaling into a larger sales and support organization could distract from technical work and community focus. They also recognized that reaching broader audiences would require solving more specialized problems, serving different industries, and investing substantially more in infrastructure.
The partnership with AWS builds on more than a year of close collaboration between the two organizations. Andy Warfield, a Distinguished Engineer and Vice President at AWS, stated in the announcement that DuckDB is “broadly used and very much loved by S3 customers today” and praised the DuckLabs team as “one of the most technically deep, humble, and high-velocity teams.”
According to the announcement, AWS has committed to supporting long-term development of DuckDB and its wider community. The acquisition will allow the DuckLabs team to work at a scale previously difficult to achieve independently, while maintaining focus on technical work.
Planned expansions include establishing a technical advisory board within the DuckDB Foundation to incorporate input from leading community members, and opening the extension stack to allow extensions signed by other developers and organizations to run in DuckDB.
The founders emphasized that the openness enabling DuckDB’s success will remain central to its future, and they acknowledged the broader community—including users, contributors, and developers who have built extensions—as essential to the project’s growth.
Key facts
- DuckLabs will join AWS in early September; the 30-person Amsterdam team will remain together
- DuckDB receives more than one million downloads daily and remains free and open source under MIT license
- The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation will continue to steward open-source projects; AWS has committed to long-term support
- DuckLabs was founded five years ago as a bootstrapped, founder-owned company to support the DuckDB project
- Planned additions include a DuckDB Foundation technical advisory board and an open extension stack