Announcing the MotherDuck Partnership

DuckDB Labs is excited to announce that we are going to be working with MotherDuck in the coming years to build a modern serverless cloud analytics platform based on DuckDB. DuckDB Labs has entered a long-term strategic partnership with MotherDuck to enrich and extend the DuckDB ecosystem. Jordan Tigani and his amazing founding team have decades of experience pushing the envelope of what is possible in cloud analytics which is why we feel confident to join them in this endeavor.

When the first ideas that eventually lead to DuckDB were thrown around, we went against the prevailing wisdom in both industry and research that only massive scale and distributed data processing would be the way forward. From our interactions with data practitioners, we became convinced that while massive datasets exist, they are mostly found in organizations that already have the technological expertise to handle them anyway. We bet on efficient and ergonomic single-node analytics, and we are very happy that the MotherDuck team shares this vision, especially given the team’s background.

MotherDuck joins DuckDB Labs’ excellent lineup of partners that includes Voltron Data, RelationalAI, Google’s Malloy Project and others. DuckDB Labs is not funded by venture capital, its sole owners are the founding team and CWI. All our revenue comes from partnerships where our partners employ DuckDB in mission-critical roles and contract with DuckDB Labs for close and long-term development collaboration. This allows DuckDB Labs to focus on pushing boundaries in the DuckDB software project without chasing exponential growth in sales.

While consulting alone is a viable business model for Open Source companies, it does not scale well. To address this, DuckDB Labs has acquired shares in MotherDuck, which connects their success with ours. This way, DuckDB Lab’s founding team joins in the financial success of our partners while allowing us to focus on the technical challenges as an artisanal database company.

MotherDuck has also started supporting the DuckDB Foundation: The DuckDB project itself is governed by the non-profit DuckDB Foundation which safeguards the intellectual property and continuity of the DuckDB Project. Its statutes also ensure DuckDB remains Open Source under the MIT license in perpetuity. The foundation appreciates donations from commercial users of DuckDB which organize in the DuckDB user association. User association members are heard for input on the development roadmap and enjoy several other benefits.

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