DuckDB stays open source while the team behind it goes to work for Amazon

Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt started as AWS employees. The two built DuckDB, an analytical database that runs inside your process instead of on a server somebody has to administer.

If you ship anything on top of DuckDB, your license does not change. Amazon did not buy the project. DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack stay free and open source under MIT, and the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continues to steward them. The team of more than 30 stays in Amsterdam, and Mühleisen and Raasveldt keep leading the technical direction.

Why they sold

DuckDB is downloaded more than a million times a day. The 30-plus person team in Amsterdam carried that load, inside a bootstrapped company owned by its founders and developers, one that turned down venture capital early and stayed small on purpose. Mühleisen and Raasveldt say they came to worry the project’s growth would outrun their ability to support it, and that DuckLabs itself could turn into the bottleneck for the project, the team, and the businesses built on it. Building out a real sales and support organization would have pulled them away from the engineering.

AWS and DuckLabs have worked together since 2024. Andy Warfield, a vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon, ran that relationship on the AWS side.

“After about two years of working closely with Mark, Hannes and the whole team at DuckLabs I’m excited at the opportunity to help the project have an even broader impact,” Warfield said.

What holds the license

DuckLabs spun out of CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science. “When DuckLabs spun out of CWI, we created this foundation, which holds all IP of open-source DuckDB, and will continue to do so,” said Peter Boncz, who leads the database architectures group at CWI and sits on the Foundation board.

Two changes are already committed. The Foundation is adding a technical advisory board so community members can weigh in on where the project goes. And the extension stack is opening up, so extensions signed by other developers and organizations will run in DuckDB.

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