// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
AWS Acquires DuckDB
Today, we’re announcing that DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is expected to be effective in early September.
Our team will remain together in Amsterdam, continuing our work on DuckDB, DuckLake, Quack, and the broader community. 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.
Most importantly, the foundations of the project will remain firmly in place. DuckDB and the other open-source components of the “Duck Stack” will remain free and open source under the MIT license, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing its stewardship of the projects.
This is a significant moment for all of us at DuckLabs. It marks the end of one chapter that we are immensely proud of, and the beginning of another that we believe can take DuckDB much further.
We founded DuckLabs a little over five years ago to give the team behind DuckDB a stable, long-term home.
At the time, DuckDB was beginning to gain real momentum. The first commercial contracts to prioritize features were materializing, and venture capital firms were calling. We chose a different path: a bootstrapped company, fully owned by its founders and development team.
That decision shaped DuckLabs in ways we value deeply. It gave us the freedom to build patiently, to put the technology first, and to grow without losing sight of why we started. From a small group gathered around an ambitious open-source project, we grew into a team of more than 30 people in Amsterdam, all while continuing to invest in DuckDB and the community taking shape around it.
During those years, DuckDB traveled much further than we imagined when the project began. Today, we see more than one million downloads every day. Developers around the world use it to explore data, power products, teach new ideas, conduct research, and build systems we could never have anticipated ourselves.
Watching that happen has been one of the great privileges of our professional lives. But the limits of our existing model also became increasingly clear. As founders, we worried that DuckDB’s growth would eventually outpace our ability to support it. That our small company could become a bottleneck for the project, the team, and the people building businesses on top of it.
We also worried that scaling DuckLabs into a much larger sales, support, and operations organization would pull our attention away from the technical work and open-source community that made DuckDB successful in the first place.