Cloud and AWS consultancy Duckbill expands into software, raises $7.75M for new Skyway platform

“We’ve raised a lot of money, and we’re building a product.”

That’s the worst announcement Wednesday morning from Corey Quinn, a cloud computing consultant who has built a second career, in fact, on his sharp and irreverent take on Amazon Web Services in his popular podcasts and newsletters.

Duckbill, the consulting firm that Quinn co-founded with Mike Julian, is doing what amounts to a high-profile pivot: it’s transforming into a software company with a new platform called Skyway that aims to make cloud use predictable for large companies.

The company, based in San Francisco, announced $7.75 million in funding from Heavybit, Uncork Capital, and Encoded Ventures to accelerate product development and grow its 10-person team.

Their contrarian pitch: the field of cloud cost management, better known in the industry as FinOps, is designed to make debts smaller, when the real problem is that no one can predict what the costs will be next month.

“Finance doesn’t lose sleep over whether your cloud debt is $1 million or $100 million,” Quinn said in a statement. “They lose sleep when it jumps 30% and nobody can explain why.”

Julian, the CEO of Duckbill, said in an interview that the company realized that cloud cost management tools were built by startups, for the most part. Many of Duckbill’s large enterprise customers had tried those tools, rejected them, and ended up building their own.

“I’m of the opinion that people building in FinOps today come from startups and not from business, so they don’t even know a lot of the problems that exist,” Julian said.

Duckbill’s customers, which include companies like Airtable, Ticketmaster, and New Relic, spend $70 million a year on cloud infrastructure, on average. (The tagline for their consulting business: “Cloud cost management for the nine-person club.”) That’s well above the $1 million annual minimum required by AWS for a private pricing contract. At that scale, Julian said, you start to see patterns and problems that don’t exist in smaller companies.

In total, the company says it has negotiated tens of billions of dollars in cloud contracts, giving you unique insights. (“Our schlep is our ditch,” reads one of its indoor whiteboards.)

Skyway’s first module, called Contract Manager, converts pricing agreements into structured data, ensuring customers receive the discounts they negotiated, and forecasting spending.

The big idea extends beyond AWS. Duckbill started exclusively in Amazon’s cloud environment but expanded to Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Julian said the ultimate goal is to streamline data usage across every piece of software and infrastructure the company uses: SaaS tools like Datadog and Snowflake, AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI, even legacy data centers for customers still using their mainframes.

Julian acknowledged that the pivot to software will eventually eat into Duckbill’s consulting business, but said he doesn’t expect it to disappear entirely. Big companies need resources, he said, pointing to companies like ServiceNow and CrowdStrike that are building large software businesses while keeping money for core services.

The market for cloud cost management technology is crowded, and difficult. The latest victim: Spokane-based Vega Cloud, which entered receivership after raising millions in funding.

But Julian argues that it is not really a single market. Companies like Point5 focus on increasing the workload. Others like Finout focus on cost allocation. He sees Duckbill doing something different: building financial planning and infrastructure forecasting software.

Duckbill does not use artificial intelligence in its product yet. This will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Quinn’s hatred of the hype industry. However, by bringing structure to messy spend data, Skyway is in a position to create what Julian calls “AI candy” – clean, labeled information that customers can use in their applications.

At the same time, AI makes it difficult to predict cloud costs.

“Cloud spending is already one of the biggest and most unpredictable things in business,” said Joseph Ruscio, general partner at Heavybit, one of the companies behind Duckbill’s pivot, in a press release announcing the funding. “The AI ​​infrastructure is about to encompass that flexibility.”

Duckbill currently has 10 employees and plans to grow to 15 by the end of the current quarter and 20 by the end of the year, most of the new hires in engineering. The company also hired Jim Moses, who previously worked at AWS as a private value consultant, as the director of hyperscaler strategy, essentially putting someone from the other side of the table on their team.

This isn’t the first time Quinn and Julian have tried to build a brand. In 2022, Duckbill tried to jump from services to software. “It was a huge failure,” as Quinn admitted in a video interview with Julian, released by the company as part of the announcement.

“It turns out that if you think you know what the customers want but you don’t talk to them, there is a place you will go but not where you wanted to go,” he said.

In addition to its website, Quinn noted, Duckbill can be reached at 833-AWS-BILL.

“He’s not kidding,” said Julian.