What Duckbill does

Duckbill (legal entity L9 Labs, Inc.) is an enterprise cloud cost management company founded in 2019 by Mike Julian and Corey Quinn and headquartered in San Francisco. The company targets organizations spending $100 million or more annually on cloud infrastructure, with a public customer roster that includes The Washington Post, Ticketmaster, Epic Games, Mercado Libre, Fanatics, Airtable, Supabase, Nextdoor, New Relic, Honeycomb, and Arctic Wolf. Duckbill operates with 11-50 employees, maintains independence from cloud provider partner programs, and is structured as a Delaware corporation; until November 2025, the company grew without institutional venture capital.

The company's core software platform is Skyway, a unified cloud data platform launched in November 2025 that ingests, parses, structures, normalizes, and cleans consumption and billing data from multiple cloud providers. The first Skyway module, Contract Manager, encodes expertise from negotiating tens of billions of dollars in cloud contracts and supports commitment tracking, discount validation, and renewal negotiation for FinOps, procurement, and finance teams. Duckbill complements the software with fixed-fee consulting services (contract negotiation, FinOps practice assessments), a recurring services retainer ("Duckbill on Demand"), and community assets including the Last Week in AWS newsletter and weekly Office Hours sessions. The company claims customer ROI between 550% and 73,300%.

Duckbill monetizes through fixed-fee consulting engagements, subscription-style services retainers, and Skyway software subscriptions, with disclosed million-dollar contracts and Fortune 500 clients. In November 2025, concurrent with the Skyway launch and rebrand from The Duckbill Group to Duckbill, the company raised a $7.75 million seed round led by Heavybit, Uncork Capital, and Encoded Ventures, with angel investors including Mark Imbriaco (Railway), Adam Gross (Heroku founder), David Singleton (former Stripe CTO), and Brian Hall (former Google Cloud/AWS VP). The company also expanded its advisory scope from AWS-only to Google Cloud, Azure, and major SaaS and AI platforms including Datadog, Anthropic, OpenAI, Snowflake, and Databricks.

Name

Duckbill

Legal name

L9 Labs, Inc.

Website

https://duckbillhq.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2019

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Duckbill helps enterprises spending $100M+/year on cloud reduce and manage cloud spend through fixed-fee consulting, a services retainer, and its Skyway cloud financial data platform, serving Fortune 500 clients including The Washington Post, Epic Games, and Mercado Libre.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Cloud Cost Management Software & Services

NAICS

Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (51821)

akta.pro primary industry

Cloud FinOps & Cost Optimization (BPAEACAH)

akta.pro secondary industries

Cloud FinOps & SaaS Spend Management (BPAEAOAH), Capacity Planning, Cost Optimization & FinOps Monitoring (HDABAJAK)

Keywords

• Cloud cost management
• FinOps consulting
• Cloud contract negotiation
• Enterprise cloud spend
• Cloud financial operations

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. Consulting Services (Fixed-Fee): Fixed-fee consulting engagements for cloud cost optimization, contract negotiation, and FinOps practice assessments. Not percentage-of-savings model. ROI guarantee with full refund if unhappy.
2. Services Retainer (Duckbill on Demand): Flexible retainer model for ongoing advisory and support. Allows clients to have Duckbill available on-demand for cloud cost management needs.
3. Skyway Platform: Software platform for cloud cost management. Contract Manager module available for enterprise customers managing $100M+/year cloud spend.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion3 records

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Duckbill helps enterprises reduce and understand their cloud spend through the Skyway cloud financial data platform and complementary professional services including cloud contract negotiation, FinOps practice assessments, and ongoing advisory retainers. The company is purpose-built for organizations spending $100 million or more annually on cloud infrastructure, serving Finance, Engineering leadership, Procurement, and FinOps teams.

Product overview

Duckbill is a cloud cost management company that operates as both a services firm and software company. The core offering is Skyway, a unified cloud data platform designed for enterprise companies spending $100M+/year. Skyway currently includes the Contract Manager module for managing cloud pricing contracts. Complementing the software, Duckbill offers professional services including contract negotiation, FinOps practice assessments, services retainers, FinOps Academy training, and weekly Office Hours sessions. The company also publishes the 'Last Week in AWS' newsletter. The product portfolio serves Finance, Engineering leadership, Business operations/procurement, and FinOps teams.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Skyway Skyway is a unified cloud financial data platform that ingests, parses, structures, normalizes, and cleans consumption and billing data from all cloud providers. It is purpose-built for companies spending $100 million or more per year on cloud and serves as an open integration point for customers' existing processes and tools.
• Skyway Contract Manager Skyway Contract Manager is the first module of the Skyway platform. It turns cloud private pricing contracts into structured data alongside consumption and billing data, enabling FinOps, procurement, and Finance teams to manage contract commitments, calculate discounts, validate discount delivery, negotiate renewals, and identify contract improvement opportunities.
• Contract Negotiation Enterprise cloud contract negotiation service that helps organizations secure optimal terms and pricing with cloud providers. Offered on a fixed-fee basis rather than percentage-of-savings, with a full refund guarantee if the client is not satisfied.
• FinOps Practice Assessments Assessment service that evaluates an organization's FinOps maturity and identifies gaps in its cloud cost management capabilities, producing a roadmap toward a more mature FinOps function.
• Services Retainer (Duckbill on Demand) Flexible retainer offering (Duckbill on Demand) providing ongoing advisory and support so enterprise clients can access Duckbill's cloud cost expertise on-demand for continuous cloud cost management needs.

Quantifiable outcome

• Every customer realizes at least 550% ROI, with some achieving up to 73,300% ROI
• +1 more outcomes

Named customers11 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Feature2 records

Partnerships

Two partnerships are on record, tiered minor.

• Chris Farris (Prime Harbor)minorImplementation/ SI/ Consulting PartnerSecurity consultant who helped design and implement Duckbill's AWS account access solution using Terraform, Granted, and AWS SSO.
• FinOps FoundationminorStrategic or Co-development PartnerIndustry organization promoting FinOps practices. Corey Quinn (Chief Cloud Economist) participates in discussions with FinOps Foundation leadership on cloud cost management evolution.

Scale indicators6 records

Recent moves5 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• ProsperOps: Automated AWS Reserved Instance and Savings Plans optimization platform. Directly competes with Duckbill's contract/commitment management expertise, especially the Skyway Contract Manager module, by automating the same discount optimization Duckbill consults on.
• Yotascale: Cloud cost management and optimization platform with AI-driven anomaly detection and commitment management. Targets the same enterprise FinOps buyer and overlaps materially with Skyway's planned scope.
• Morpheus (HPE): Cloud cost management and optimization platform focused on multi-cloud spend visibility and resource optimization. Comparable to Duckbill in serving FinOps teams and engineering leadership at enterprises with significant cloud footprints.
• CloudZero: Cloud cost management platform purpose-built for engineering and finance teams at cloud-native and enterprise companies. Directly competes with Duckbill's Skyway platform in cloud FinOps, anomaly detection, and unit economics, and overlaps with Duckbill's enterprise cost-optimization services.
• Vantage: Cloud cost intelligence platform offering multi-cloud cost reporting, anomaly detection, and reserved instance/commitment management for engineering and FinOps teams. Closely comparable to Skyway's planned capabilities and serves a similar buyer persona.
• Spot by NetApp: Cloud infrastructure optimization platform for compute, containers, and serverless workloads, with automated spot instance and reserved capacity management. Overlaps with Duckbill's cost optimization and architectural advisory for cloud-native enterprises.

Emerging players

• CAST AI: Kubernetes-focused cloud cost optimization platform that automatically rightsizes workloads and selects cheapest compute. Adjacent to Duckbill's cloud cost optimization services but with a narrower focus on Kubernetes environments.

Broad incumbents

• Apptio (IBM): Enterprise IT financial management (ITFM) and FinOps platform, now part of IBM. Competes broadly with Duckbill's enterprise cost-management positioning, particularly for Fortune 500 finance and procurement teams, though it covers much broader IT spend categories.
• IBM Instana (Observability): Enterprise observability and AIOps platform that increasingly bundles cost and performance optimization. Adjacent competitor in the FinOps-adjacent observability space and a logical consolidation target that could squeeze standalone FinOps players.

Others

• FinOps Foundation: Industry body advancing FinOps practices, training, and certifications (including the FinOps Certified Practitioner credential). Not a competitor, but a strategic ecosystem partner; Duckbill's Corey Quinn participates in foundation leadership discussions, and the foundation shapes buyer expectations.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/DuckbillHQ
• GitHubgithub.com/DuckbillGroup
• YouTubeyoutube.com/@LastWeekinAWS
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/duckbillhq

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds1 record

Investors3 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Duckbill