Duckbill

Duckbill, formerly The Duckbill Group, positions itself as a financial control layer for the compute economy, helping companies negotiate, manage, and forecast spend across clouds, model labs, neoclouds, inference APIs, coding assistants, and hyperscalers. The company describes itself as a technology company with deep financial expertise in infrastructure rather than a financial firm with a technology add-on, pairing purpose-built software with practitioners who make judgment calls on contracts and commitments.

Its platform, Skyway, is described as a contract-aware compute financial management system that models contracts and consumption together. Capabilities include a registry of all signed commitments (hyperscaler commitments, prepaid credits, committed-spend tiers, reserved capacity), burn-down and projected end-of-term views, under- and over-consumption risk alerts, renewal timing, scenario modeling of AI and cloud usage against real pricing, benchmarking of effective rates against retail and proprietary private-market data, and invoice validation that checks each provider invoice against contract and usage to flag misapplied discounts, billing errors, and unlanded credits, with evidence for disputes.

Alongside the platform, Duckbill publishes a blog on cloud and AI cost topics authored by CEO Mike Julian, Chief Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and Principal Cloud Economist Eric Pullen, covering subjects such as AWS savings plans, reserved instance deprecation, CloudFront pricing, and FinOps practice.

Business model

Duckbill combines a subscription-style software platform (Skyway) with expert advisory work on cloud and AI contract negotiation and cost management; the company states customers pay it, renew, and refer others, and that it has real revenue.

Revenue comes from customers paying for the Skyway platform and Duckbill's cloud economics engagements; the company references paid engagements whose findings are described as more than covering their cost, and reports renewals.

Traction

The company reports roughly 15 employees, $7.75 million raised, real revenue, paying and renewing customers, and experience negotiating tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure contracts since 2019. Named customers and referenced users include Honeycomb, Fanatics, Epsilon, a Fortune 100 company approving an $11 million AWS invoice, a public edtech company, a major domestic airline, and a computationally driven biotech startup.

Latest developments

Skyway was introduced in November 2025 as contract management for enterprise cloud spend aimed at nine-figure spenders, and the platform is described as early with roadmap decisions still open while customers depend on shipped functionality. The company continues hiring and published blog analysis through February 2026.