Duckbill is relevant to the AI agent ecosystem through the lens of cost governance and infrastructure automation. As companies increasingly deploy AI agents that are capable of autonomously provisioning infrastructure, scaling workloads, or selecting model endpoints, the financial risk of unmanaged operations grows exponentially. Duckbill's Skyway platform provides the structured contract data necessary for organizations to set hard financial guardrails around agentic behavior.
In a world where agents might be tasked with optimizing cloud performance or reducing spend, those agents need an accurate data source that reflects private pricing and contractual commitments rather than just public list prices. Duckbill acts as a critical layer in the infrastructure stack that provides the financial truth agents require to operate safely within corporate budgets. Their move into structured data extraction from complex legal contracts also mirrors many of the RAG-based use cases currently being developed by agent builders in the legal and financial sectors.
Duckbill, founded by Mike Julian and Corey Quinn, began as a high-end consulting firm known as The Duckbill Group. Their primary focus was the labyrinthine world of AWS billing, where they specialized in fixing massive cloud bills for enterprise clients. In 2025 and 2026, the company underwent a transition, rebranding to simply Duckbill and raising $7.75 million to launch Skyway. This new software platform is designed to turn the messy, often manual process of cloud contract management into a structured data exercise.
The logic behind the pivot is straightforward: cloud costs are an engineering problem that is frequently mismanaged by finance teams. Most existing FinOps tools provide a surface-level view of public pricing but struggle to accurately reflect the complex, private discounts and commitment terms found in large enterprise contracts. Duckbill aim to bridge this gap by providing a system of record that accounts for the specific, negotiated realities of a company's infrastructure deal.
Skyway works by ingesting private pricing contracts and converting them into structured data. This allows enterprises to perform tasks that were previously difficult or manual: measuring the real performance of a commitment, validating that a cloud provider's bill is actually accurate against the contract, and tracking the impact of discounts over time. The platform is built for companies spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure, a segment where even a one percent deviation in billing accuracy or a missed commitment opportunity results in millions of dollars in waste.
The company is vocal about the limitations of standard automated tools. Their perspective is that tools without expert judgment are insufficient for cloud cost chaos because ownership of cloud spend is fragmented across multiple departments. Finance may pay the bill, but engineering generates it, and neither side typically has the full picture of how technical decisions impact the corporate bottom line. Duckbill provides the technical expertise to translate between these two worlds.
Duckbill sits in a unique position relative to competitors like CloudHealth or Cloudability. While those tools are often bundled into larger corporate suites, Duckbill remains an independent, opinionated voice. They are frequently consulted by cloud providers themselves for feedback on new features, such as AWS's Database Savings Plans. This insider status, combined with a willingness to publicly criticize cloud providers for confusing billing practices, gives them a level of trust that traditional enterprise software vendors rarely enjoy.
The company is based in the United States and has cultivated a significant presence through the "Last Week in AWS" newsletter and podcast ecosystem. This media-first approach has allowed them to acquire high-value customers like Ticketmaster, Nextdoor, and Supabase. By focusing exclusively on cloud economics, Duckbill avoids the distractions of broader IT management suites, keeping their engineering effort concentrated on the financial nuances of modern infrastructure stacks.
Contract management for enterprise cloud spend.
Duckbill is hiring.