DuckLabs to Join AWS, Projects to Remain Open Source
Today, we’re announcing that DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is expected to be effective in early September.
Our team will remain together in Amsterdam, continuing our work on DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and the broader community. Joining AWS gives us the resources and reach to bring this technology to many more developers and organizations, and to pursue ideas at a scale that would have been difficult for us to reach alone.
Most importantly, the foundations of the project will remain firmly in place. DuckDB and the other open-source components of the “Duck Stack” will remain free and open source under the MIT license, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing its stewardship of the projects.
This is a significant moment for all of us at DuckLabs. It marks the end of one chapter that we are immensely proud of, and the beginning of another that we believe can take DuckDB much further.
Our Journey to This Point
We founded DuckLabs a little over five years ago to give the team behind DuckDB a stable, long-term home.
At the time, DuckDB was beginning to gain real momentum. The first commercial contracts to prioritize features were materializing, and venture capital firms were calling. We chose a different path: a bootstrapped company, fully owned by its founders and development team.
That decision shaped DuckLabs in ways we value deeply. It gave us the freedom to build patiently, to put the technology first, and to grow without losing sight of why we started. From a small group gathered around an ambitious open-source project, we grew into a team of more than 30 people in Amsterdam, all while continuing to invest in DuckDB and the community taking shape around it.
During those years, DuckDB traveled much further than we imagined when the project began. Today, we see more than one million downloads every day. Developers around the world use it to explore data, power products, teach new ideas, conduct research, and build systems we could never have anticipated ourselves.
Watching that happen has been one of the great privileges of our professional lives. But the limits of our existing model also became increasingly clear. As founders, we worried that DuckDB’s growth would eventually outpace our ability to support it. That our small company could become a bottleneck for the project, the team, and the people building businesses on top of it.
We also worried that scaling DuckLabs into a much larger sales, support, and operations organization would pull our attention away from the technical work and open-source community that made DuckDB successful in the first place.
Our partnerships work best with highly technical organizations – often companies with substantial database expertise of their own. Reaching a much broader group of users requires us to solve more complete and specialized problems, serve the needs of different industries, invest substantially more in infrastructure, and reach people who may never think to seek out an analytical database directly.
We believe the DuckDB revolution can grow by another couple of orders of magnitude. To give it that opportunity, we realized we needed a different setup.
Why AWS
DuckLabs and AWS have already been working closely together for more than a year. During that time, we came to understand how our teams collaborate, what each brings to the table, and what might become possible by combining DuckLabs’ technical expertise with AWS’s infrastructure, scale, and customer reach.
That experience gave us confidence in taking this next step.
Together, we plan to use DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack to help power a new generation of data services. Our ambition is to reach people who may eventually depend on the Duck Stack every day, whether they interact with it directly or encounter it quietly inside the products and services they use.
For the DuckLabs team, joining AWS creates the space to concentrate on the technical work we care about most while operating at a scale we could not easily achieve on our own. It allows us to think further ahead, be bolder, tackle harder problems, and bring the ideas behind DuckDB to many more people.
AWS has committed to supporting the continued development of DuckDB and its wider community for the long term. That commitment matters deeply to us.
Quote “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)
What Will Remain the Same
We know that an announcement like this brings important – and understandable – questions for users, contributors, customers, and partners.
DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and the other open-source components of the Duck Stack will remain free and open source under the MIT license. The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation will continue to steward these projects, and the DuckLabs team will continue to contribute to the project and remain together in Amsterdam.
The open-source projects will continue to serve a broad community of users, contributors, platforms, and vendors. The openness that allowed DuckDB to flourish will remain central to its future.
We care deeply about the trust this community has placed in us. Protecting that trust has been one of the most important considerations throughout this process.
What We Plan to Expand
Joining AWS will give us greater capacity to invest in both the technology and the community around it. Going forward, the DuckDB Foundation will include a technical advisory board, so that leading community members can provide their input on the project’s technical direction. We also plan to open the extension stack so that extensions signed by other developers and organizations can run in DuckDB.
There is a great deal of work ahead, and many details still to shape. We will share more as these plans develop.
The Next Chapter
DuckDB’s success has always belonged to a much larger community than the people working inside DuckLabs.
It belongs to everyone who has used it, contributed code, reported a bug, written an extension, answered a question, published a benchmark, taught a class, built a product, challenged our assumptions, or recommended DuckDB to someone else. Every one of those acts helped the project become what it is today.
We do not take that support – or the trust behind it – for granted.
Joining AWS gives the DuckLabs team an extraordinary opportunity to bring the Duck Stack to a much larger audience while continuing to invest in the open-source technology at its heart. We enter this next chapter with the same curiosity, care, and technical ambition that brought us here, alongside a team that has been through the entire journey together.
To everyone who helped us reach this point: thank you. We are proud of what we have built together, excited by what now lies ahead, and looking forward to building the next chapter with you.
You’re also welcome to check out our press release and the media kit.