AWS is acquiring DuckLabs, the company behind the increasingly popular DuckDB analytical database, as Amazon looks to deepen the analytics capabilities surrounding data stored in its cloud.
Financial terms were not disclosed. DuckLabs said its more than 30 employees, including co-founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, are expected to join AWS in early September.
The deal does not include the DuckDB open-source project itself. DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and other open-source components will remain free under the MIT license, with the independent nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing to oversee the projects, according to DuckLabs.
Why AWS wants DuckDB
DuckDB is designed to run inside applications rather than requiring a separate database server. That makes it particularly useful for developers who want to analyze data directly where it sits, including files stored on Amazon S3.
AWS says DuckDB is also well suited to AI agents, which often run smaller, exploratory queries before deciding what larger analysis they need.
The companies already have a working relationship. AWS said the teams have collaborated since 2024, including on integrations involving S3 Tables and other data services.
Amazon also cited an internal example noting its Quick dashboarding service has processed more than 2.5 billion queries using DuckDB integrations and optimizations since its October 2025 launch, reducing average query latency by 30%.
DuckDB gets AWS scale
For DuckLabs, the acquisition solves a problem created by its own success. The company said DuckDB now sees more than 1 million downloads a day and that its growth was starting to raise concerns about whether a small organization could continue supporting the project and its expanding community.
Rather than raise venture capital or build a much larger commercial operation, DuckLabs chose AWS. The founders said the move gives their team greater resources and reach while allowing them to remain focused on technical development.
DuckLabs also plans to strengthen the role of the DuckDB Foundation by adding a technical advisory board and opening its extension system to signed extensions from outside developers and organizations.
Why this deal matters
The strategic value for AWS starts with data gravity. Amazon’s cloud storage service, S3, already holds enormous volumes of enterprise data, and DuckDB gives developers a lightweight way to analyze that information without necessarily moving it into a separate database system first.
Bringing the DuckLabs team inside AWS could make that style of in-place analytics easier across Amazon’s cloud services. That does not eliminate the need for platforms such as Snowflake or Databricks, but it gives AWS another way to keep analytics workloads closer to the data already stored in its infrastructure.
The acquisition also fits AWS’s push toward agentic AI. AI agents frequently need to inspect datasets, test queries, and retrieve relatively small pieces of information before launching more expensive workloads. Making those exploratory queries faster and cheaper could become increasingly valuable as companies deploy more autonomous software across their data environments.
Other acquisition news: Nasuni has acquired DryvIQ to add AI-powered data classification and governance capabilities, helping enterprises prepare unstructured data for secure AI use.