On 26 August 2026, Amazon.com announced the acquisition of Duck Labs, the Dutch company behind the popular open-source database DuckDB. No purchase price was disclosed.
Who is being acquired
Duck Labs is based in Amsterdam and employs around 30 people. Founded roughly five years ago, the company had previously turned down offers from venture capital investors. DuckDB began as an efficient relational SQL database for data analysis and has grown into a widely used tool. Its co-founders include Hannes Muehleisen and Mark Raasveldt.
Open source is preserved
DuckDB, Duck Lake and Quack remain open source under the MIT license and continue to be led by the independent DuckDB Foundation. Amazon stated that it wants to make “AWS analytics faster, simpler and more cost-efficient” for its customers.
What happens to Mother Duck
Seattle-based Mother Duck, founded by Jordan Tigani, offers cloud services built on DuckDB. It intends to keep contributing to the project while competing with AWS. For users of the database, the acquisition changes nothing about its free availability for now.
Sources: heise online.
