MotherDuck launches its DuckDB-based cloud analytics platform

Open source database company MotherDuck, which has raised a total of $47.5 million, today announced the launch of its serverless cloud analytics platform. Co-founded by Google BigQuery founding engineer Jordan Tigani, MotherDuck’s focus so far has been on building out their platform alongside the original creators of DuckDB, the embeddable open source database for analytics use cases.

The promise of DuckDB is that as an in-process SQL-compatible analytics process database, developers will get the benefits of an analytics database without the complexity of managing it. Unlike databases like Postgres, there’s very little to set up, and since it’s embedded in the application, data transfers are very fast. This makes DuckDB ideally suited for local data analysis. MotherDuck itself likens DuckDB to “SQLite for analytics workloads.”

Image Credits: MotherDuck

“As nearly every organization, large and small, strives to figure out how to get value out of their data, scale becomes much less interesting than making it easy to derive insights. While today is a momentous day for our company, it is just a first flap of our wings on this journey,” said MotherDuck CEO Tigani. “We’re confident that the combined innovation between MotherDuck’s platform and DuckDB Labs’s database will be a critical piece of how the modern data stack evolves over the next few years. Ultimately, we’re proud to be able to deliver on our vision to bring the power of DuckDB to more people. And of course to make analytics ducking awesome.”

MotherDuck is obviously treading a well-worn path here. Launching a SaaS-based version of an open source project is, after all, the current default to monetize these tools. The company is launching its platform at the right time, though. Even companies that aren’t focusing their data strategies on AI are increasingly aware of the value of operationalizing their data, and while many of the existing tools focus on big data use cases, DuckDB — and MotherDuck’s serverless offering — also cater to small and medium businesses.

The MotherDuck team stresses that this new offering also makes it easier for users whose data is already in the cloud to move to DuckDB.