DuckLabs agrees to join AWS while DuckDB stays with its foundation

Why it matters

Raasveldt and Muehleisen found an exit that preserves the Foundation's stewardship of DuckDB. The transaction had not closed as of August 26; the founders are [expected to join AWS at closing](https://www.publicnow.com/view/794AC2408DBC8FE28A8C98096B4D86E779906AF3?ref=runtimewire). The test is whether the roadmap remains broadly governed once AWS employs the core team.

Hannes Muehleisen and Mark Raasveldt, the researchers who created DuckDB, agreed to sell their bootstrapped operating company, DuckLabs, to Amazon Web Services. The deal is expected to close in early September, subject to customary conditions. DuckLabs' team of more than 30 people will remain together in Amsterdam, and the founders are expected to continue leading the group and DuckDB's technical direction inside AWS. (DuckLabs)

The asset boundary is unusually important here. AWS will acquire DuckLabs and employ its engineers if the transaction closes. The DuckDB Foundation will continue to steward DuckDB, DuckLake and Quack, with the projects remaining free and open source under the MIT license. The public announcements do not state a purchase price or describe the founders' post-closing reporting structure. (Amazon)

That structure would give Muehleisen and Raasveldt an exit from the commercial demands accumulating around DuckDB without transferring the open-source project they started at Amsterdam research institute CWI in 2018 to AWS.

Two database researchers built DuckLabs without venture capital

Muehleisen is a senior database researcher at CWI and a professor of data engineering at Radboud University. Before DuckLabs, his research posts included Freie Universitaet Berlin, CWI, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Amsterdam. Raasveldt earned bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science at Utrecht University before completing a 2020 PhD at Leiden University, where his dissertation examined how analytical and machine-learning programs could work directly with relational databases. (CWI)

Their work produced DuckDB, an analytical SQL database that runs inside an application rather than requiring a separate database server. DuckDB can query local files and cloud object storage directly, including formats such as Parquet and Iceberg. The design borrowed SQLite's embedded simplicity and applied it to analytical workloads, making DuckDB useful inside notebooks, developer tools and production software without a database cluster to operate. (DuckLabs)

The founders created DuckLabs in 2021 as commercial contracts for feature development began to appear. Venture firms called, according to the founders, but DuckLabs remained fully owned by its founders and development team. Revenue came from enterprise support, technical advice, feature development and engineering partnerships rather than institutional funding. (DuckLabs)

That decision let the researchers build a 30-person organization without a financing clock. DuckLabs says the project now records over one million downloads a day, a company-supplied figure whose measurement method was not detailed in the announcement. (DuckLabs)

Muehleisen and Raasveldt described that growth as the source of the constraint. They worried DuckLabs would become a bottleneck for users building businesses on DuckDB. Expanding sales, infrastructure, support and industry-specific services would also pull the founders toward operating a larger enterprise software vendor and away from database engineering.

AWS would address that constraint by supplying an existing customer base, infrastructure and support organization. DuckLabs plans to keep its Amsterdam group intact, while its founders continue working on the engine and surrounding projects. The founders chose to trade organizational independence for scale after preserving financial independence through DuckLabs' first five years.

AWS had already put DuckDB next to S3

The agreement follows a technical relationship dating to 2024, according to AWS. In March 2025, DuckLabs and AWS collaborated on DuckDB support for Amazon S3 Tables through Apache Iceberg REST catalogs. The integration let developers query tables stored in AWS services directly from DuckDB. (DuckDB)

DuckLabs said more than a year of collaboration showed how the teams worked together and gave it confidence in the transaction. (DuckLabs)

AWS Vice President and Distinguished Engineer Andy Warfield said the organizations had worked closely for roughly two years. The companies plan to use DuckDB, DuckLake and Quack to help power a new generation of data services, though the announcements do not identify specific services or a product timeline. (DuckLabs)

The agreement also lands as DuckDB stretches beyond its original embedded design. On August 17th, RuntimeWire reported that the founders were preparing DuckDB v2.0 to stabilize Quack and introduce the CONNECT command. Quack allows one DuckDB process to serve databases over a network, while CONNECT can route queries to remote DuckDB, PostgreSQL and MySQL systems. (DuckDB)

Server mode creates a clearer path into long-running, multi-user and cloud-hosted workloads. AWS is set to acquire the core engineering group just as DuckDB begins addressing use cases that require observability, network protocols and production infrastructure alongside a fast local query engine.

The license stays open; practical influence remains concentrated

The DuckDB Foundation provides a legal barrier between the transaction and the open-source projects. The nonprofit will continue to steward DuckDB, DuckLake and Quack, which remain under the MIT license. That license allows outside developers and vendors to use, modify and fork the software. (DuckDB Foundation)

Governance remains closely tied to the creators. If the transaction closes, the founders will lead the DuckLabs group inside AWS and continue contributing to the project, giving AWS substantial practical influence through the people who write the software and guide its technical direction even though the Foundation will continue its stewardship.

DuckLabs is pairing the agreement with two governance and distribution changes. The Foundation plans to establish a technical advisory board so community members can provide input on the roadmap. DuckLabs also intends to open its extension signing system, allowing extensions signed by outside developers and organizations to run in DuckDB. Those commitments address a central concern for vendors building around the database: whether AWS employment of the core team will narrow participation elsewhere in the DuckDB market. (DuckLabs)

Muehleisen and Raasveldt have arranged an exit that preserves the project architecture they spent years constructing around their research. If the transaction closes, AWS will get the engineers, their commercial operation and proximity to DuckDB's roadmap. The Foundation will continue to steward the MIT-licensed projects.

The next phase will test whether that legal separation is matched by broad technical participation. The MIT license allows DuckDB to remain open. The advisory board, extension policies and day-to-day roadmap decisions will determine how independent its surrounding market feels once its creators join AWS.