Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Duckbill

"Cloud spend is already one of the largest and least predictable line items in the enterprise. 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.” -Joseph Ruscio, General Partner/Heavybit

Heavybit is thrilled to welcome Duckbill, the enterprise FP&A platform for the Cloud, to our portfolio. Duckbill helps enterprises decipher complex cloud billing to both conserve costs today and create accurate projections for tomorrow.

It’s not exactly a secret that for enterprises, cloud expenditures have been increasing for years. A less-frequently discussed challenge is the explosion in complexity of cloud billing.

Beyond compute, storage, and networking, invoices for cloud spend seem to become more complicated with every billing cycle. The added complexity has made it increasingly difficult for teams working in finance, FinOps, procurement, and even engineering to understand individual line items…and all but impossible to confidently create an accurate overall forecast for the future.

Why We’re Excited

The Skyway platform is the product of the team’s deep experience studying and managing cloud billing for the Fortune 500. As The Duckbill Group, the founders previously built a successful a consultancy working with enterprises across a variety of engagements for many years.

Mike and Corey have now channeled their extensive expertise negotiating 11-figure contracts with cloud hyperscalers to create a platform that brings their domain knowledge to enterprise customers at scale.

The Skyway platform centralizes infrastructure and billing data to let customers perform analysis that dives far below the surface. With the Skyway platform, customers can tackle the complex, large-scale cloud billing challenges with which every modern enterprise struggles.

Moving forward, Skyway will continue to scale its team as it serves some of the most ambitious enterprises in the world.

Meet the Founders

Mike Julian

CEO and Co-Founder

Mike Julian is the CEO and cofounder of Duckbill. Prior to Duckbill, Mike founded Monitoring Weekly where he served as Editor-in-Chief and industry analyst for the observability space, wrote Practical Monitoring with O’Reilly Media, and previously worked in large-scale datacenter and network infrastructure. Mike lives in San Francisco, CA and is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!).

Corey Quinn

Chief Cloud Economist and Co-Founder

Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies understand their cloud bills by making them less horrifying. He also hosts the “Screaming in the Cloud” and “Last Week in AWS” podcasts; and curates the “Last Week in AWS” newsletter, summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure.