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Amazon Acquires DuckLabs and Integrates DuckDB in Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL
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Amazon has acquired DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based creator of the analytical database DuckDB. Financial terms were not disclosed. DuckDB co-founders Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt will continue leading the team and the open-source project's technical direction under AWS.
The co-founders said joining AWS provides resources and reach to bring the technology to more developers. It also lets them pursue ideas at a scale difficult to achieve alone. They announced the decision on the DuckLabs blog.
All parties reassured the community about open source. DuckDB and the "Duck Stack," including DuckLake and Quack, will remain free under the MIT licence. The non-profit DuckDB Foundation will continue supervising the projects.
AWS technology vice president Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec said DuckDB targets blazingly fast performance for the 90%+ of queries running on 1 terabyte or less. She argued its optimizations suit agentic AI workloads. AI agents often run small exploratory queries before deciding how to proceed.
The community welcomed the news with some skepticism. On Reddit, user adappergentlefolk hoped innovation would not slow, but was glad the founders cashed in while keeping most work open source. Andy Warfield, an AWS distinguished engineer, said collaboration grew over two years through S3 Tables, Lambda, and DuckDB's ATTACH and CONNECT commands.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is the first service to get a user-facing DuckDB-powered feature. Esra Kayabali, AWS principal solutions architect, said old approaches used reverse ETL pipelines that duplicated data and raised costs. The integration lets one query combine live operational data with historical Apache Iceberg, Parquet, and S3 Tables data. Processing stays inside Aurora without extra network hops.
