“For our mid-market customers there’s always been a gap between a spreadsheet and a full Redshift cluster. DuckDB lives in that gap, and now AWS owns it,” says Justin Copie, CEO of AWS premier partner Innovative Solutions.
Amazon Web Services is acquiring DuckLabs—the company behind the popular open source analytical database DuckDB—in a move that AWS’ CEO says will boost database engineering and “make AWS analytics faster, simpler and more cost-effective” for customers.
“DuckDB changed how developers work with data,” said AWS CEO Matt Garman on X on Wednesday.
“It runs anywhere, it’s fast, and people reach for it because it just works. DuckDB stays free and open source under the DuckDB Foundation,” Garman said. “Excited about what’s ahead.”
Amazon expects to complete its acquisition of DuckLabs by early September. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
AWS’ Acquisition Of DuckLabs Fills A ‘Gap’ For Customers, AWS Partner Explains
Once completed, DuckLabs will become part of Seattle-based AWS.
“For our mid-market customers there’s always been a gap between a spreadsheet and a full Redshift cluster. DuckDB lives in that gap, and now AWS owns it,” said Justin Copie, CEO of AWS premier partner Innovative Solutions.
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“Everybody wants intelligent agents, and virtually no one wants to spend the time or money to clean their data. But the fuel decides how far the rocket goes,” Copie said.
Copie said DuckDB became popular because customers wanted “to build rapid data warehouse prototypes, small-scale BI, in an effort to get real answers without standing up heavy infrastructure.”
“That’s exactly where most of our mid-market customers live. They have AI ambitions and messy data, and the honest first step is rarely a big platform buy. It’s getting the data usable, which is why I like AWS’ acquisition here,” Copie said.
“The move I’ll be watching is whether AWS turns this into a managed service,” Copie said.
“If they do, it becomes the on-ramp for customers to start small, prove value, and grow into the bigger analytics stack,” he said. “That’s good for AWS and good for partners like us who live in that middle market.”
AWS Not Buying DuckDB, DuckLake And Quack
AWS’ acquisition of the Amsterdam-based company does not include DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack projects, which will remain open source and independently governed by the non-profit DuckDB Foundation.
“We are 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,” Amazon said in a statement.
Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who created DuckDB and co-founded DuckLabs, will continue leading the team and the technical direction.
“The smartest part of the deal is what they didn’t buy. DuckDB stays open source under an independent foundation. I think this signals AWS buying the talent and keeping the trust,” Copie said.
The Future Of DuckLake, DuckDB And AWS
DuckLabs’ co-founders said 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.”
Raasveldt and Mühleisen said DuckLabs being acquired by AWS creates a space to concentrate on the technical work DuckLabs “cares 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,” Raasveldt and Mühleisen said in a blog post.
“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,” they said.
AWS’ Plan For DuckLake
AWS, for its part, said the combined entity will “make AWS analytics faster, simpler, and more cost-effective for customers.”
AWS said it has worked with the DuckDB team for years with the idea of building a tool that lets users work with data with confidence.
“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,” said Andy Warfield, Amazon’s vice president and distinguished engineer, in a statement. “We’ve been working closely with the DuckLabs team for the past two years, and I am so excited at the opportunity to work with them even more closely.”
AWS generated $42.2 billion in revenue during the second quarter of 2026.
The company now has an annual run rate of $169 billion.
