Duckbill raises $7.75M and launches Skyway to forecast cloud-AI bills

Duckbill Group said it raised $7.75 million in a seed/early funding round and commercially launched Skyway, a unified cost-management data platform designed to help enterprises forecast cloud and AI spending. The financing came from Heavybit, Uncork Capital, and Encoded Ventures, the company said in a PR Newswire release distributed Feb. 18.

Skyway debuts with a Contract Manager module that converts private pricing deals into structured data, validates that customers are receiving negotiated discounts, and projects future spending. Company messaging describes Skyway as a forecasting platform and a unified data layer intended to "make cloud spend predictable and actionable for complex enterprises." Duckbill also announced Jim Moses as director of Hyperscaler Strategy and said it will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its team of cloud cost experts.

Corey Quinn, Duckbill’s co-founder and public commentator on cloud costs, summed up the shift in a characteristic aside reported by GeekWire: "We’ve raised a pile of money, and we’re building a product." GeekWire also reported the company is based in San Francisco and operates a roughly 10-person team that will grow with the new funding.

The company pitches Skyway as a response to what it calls rising "cloud dissatisfaction", not because cloud is inherently expensive but because consumption-based billing has created unprecedented complexity. PR Newswire noted that "with AWS alone offering 2.3 million SKUs," finance and engineering teams increasingly struggle to predict and explain infrastructure costs the way they once did for traditional capital expenses.

That unpredictability carries concrete social and public health consequences as cloud computing and AI move into mission-critical arenas. Hospitals, public health agencies, community clinics, and small governments adopting AI tools for diagnostics, scheduling, billing, and analytics face the same consumption-based pricing complexities as enterprise tech teams. Unbudgeted or volatile cloud bills can force administrators to delay purchases, scale back deployments, or divert funds from services, widening inequities between resource-rich institutions and underfunded providers serving vulnerable populations.

Duckbill says Skyway aims to normalize spend data across the stack, beginning with cloud platforms and expanding to SaaS vendors and AI providers. GeekWire summarized co-founder Mike Julian’s product vision as structuring spending data across every piece of software and infrastructure a company uses, including SaaS tools such as Datadog and Snowflake, AI providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI, and legacy data centers and mainframes. Duckbill also cites a customer roster that includes Airtable, Epsilon, New Relic, Arctic Wolf, Ticketmaster, and Honeycomb, though the company has not disclosed which organizations are Skyway pilots or early customers.

Investors and buyers are paying attention as enterprises accelerate AI adoption without standardized ways to forecast consumption-based spend. For public-sector and nonprofit buyers, better forecasting tools could translate into more stable budgets and predictable service delivery. For companies competing to provide those tools, the opportunity lies in turning opaque, variable bills into actionable forecasts that can be baked into operating plans.

Duckbill’s press materials list a media contact at marketing@duckbillhq.com and more information at duckbillhq.com. The company declined to disclose valuation, pricing, or a detailed module roadmap in its announcement.