Amazon signed a definitive agreement to buy DuckLabs, the Amsterdam company that builds the open-source analytics database DuckDB, for undisclosed terms, with the team joining AWS in early September. Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who built DuckDB at the Dutch research institute CWI and founded DuckLabs to house it, keep their roughly 30 engineers together in Amsterdam and stay in charge of the project’s technical direction. Amazon isn’t buying the code, since DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack all stay MIT-licensed under the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation. DuckLabs had refused venture money and stayed founder-owned, but the two wrote that a project pulling more than a million downloads a day was outgrowing a company their size.
