Duckbill Launches Skyway to Fix What Cloud Cost Management Gets Wrong

Company raises $7.75M to tackle the real problem: making cloud spend predictable and actionable across the organization, not just smaller

Jim Moses joins as Director of Hyperscaler Strategy

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Duckbill today announced Skyway, its unified cost management data platform. The cloud cost management company also raised $7.75 million from Heavybit, Uncork Capital, and Encoded Ventures to accelerate the platform's development and expand its team of seasoned cloud cost experts.

The funding comes as enterprises face mounting "cloud dissatisfaction"—not because cloud is expensive, but because consumption-based billing has created unprecedented complexity. With AWS alone offering 2.3 million SKUs, finance teams can no longer predict or explain their infrastructure costs the way they could with traditional capital expenses.

"The industry drove right past the actual problem. Cloud bills aren't too big—they're too unpredictable," said Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist and Co-founder at Duckbill. "Finance doesn't lose sleep over whether your cloud bill is $1 million or $100 million. They lose sleep when it jumps 30% and nobody can explain why. That's the crisis we're solving."

Beyond Optimization: A Data Platform for Enterprise FinOps

Drawing from seven years managing enterprise cloud costs at massive scale, Duckbill identified a gap in the market. While the industry built tools for finding savings, it left practitioners to figure out the other 90% of their work on their own: budgeting, forecasting, investigating variances, training and enablement, negotiating with vendors, governance, and stakeholder management.

Skyway addresses this by making consumption and spend data explorable, predictable, and actionable across the entire organization. Unlike point solutions focused solely on cost reduction, Skyway serves as an open integration point for existing business processes—providing Finance, Engineering, Procurement, Product, and FinOps teams with reliable data they can actually use.

"We know we can't pry spreadsheets out of anyone's hands, so we're not trying to," said Mike Julian, CEO and Co-founder. "Instead, we're providing the entire business with more reliable data in an easier, quicker, and cheaper way. We're building a data platform, not another dashboard telling you to shut off idle instances."

Skyway turns cloud private pricing contracts into structured data, enabling enterprises to measure commitment performance, validate billing accuracy, track discount impact, and identify new opportunities—capabilities critical for enterprises spending tens of millions annually on cloud infrastructure.

Industry Veteran Joins to Lead Hyperscaler Strategy

Duckbill also announced the appointment of Jim Moses as Director of Hyperscaler Strategy. Moses brings over seven years of experience negotiating cloud contracts valued up to several billion dollars annually, including time as a private pricing negotiator at AWS and leadership roles at Hitachi and Dell.

Backing from Operators Who Understand the Problem

"Cloud spend is already one of the largest and least predictable line items in the enterprise," said Joseph Ruscio, General Partner at Heavybit. "AI infrastructure is about to compound that volatility. Finance teams can't run a business on reactive reporting or spreadsheet models. Duckbill is building the platform enterprises need to forecast and govern cloud and AI spend with precision."

"Duckbill has spent years solving the hardest cloud cost problems for some of the most sophisticated buyers in the market," said Andy McLoughlin, Managing Partner at Uncork Capital. "Now they're taking that playbook and turning it into software that scales—that's a powerful foundation for building the category leader."

"Duckbill has long been a trusted advisor to the world's largest cloud customers — and famously, for their spicy takes," said Alex Benik, Founder at Encoded Ventures. "When the opportunity arose to help shape the company's future, it was an easy decision to make this Encoded's first investment."

Duckbill's angel investors include Mark Imbriaco (Head of Engineering at Railway, former Sr. Director of Engineering at Epic Games, VP Tech Ops at Digital Ocean), Adam Gross (founder/former CEO of Heroku), David Singleton (CEO of /dev/agents, former CTO of Stripe), Brian Hall (former VP Product Marketing at Google Cloud and AWS), and other notable leaders from companies including AWS, Airbnb, Instacart, Block, Confluent, Epic Games, and Cribl.

Duckbill works with companies including Airtable, Epsilon, New Relic, Arctic Wolf, Ticketmaster, and Honeycomb.

About Duckbill

Duckbill makes cloud spend predictable and actionable for complex enterprises. Combining deep expertise from negotiating tens of billions in cloud contracts with their Skyway data platform, Duckbill helps organizations shift from reactive cost management to strategic financial planning across their entire infrastructure stack.

Learn more at duckbillhq.com

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SOURCE Duckbill