Duck Creek went public in the middle of a pandemic as a company Accenture had spun out four years earlier. Its customers were property and casualty insurers, many still running policy, claims, and billing on aging in-house systems. Duck Creek offered them modern software as a service. When it filed in 2020, insurers were rushing to move work online, and investors were paying high prices for any cloud software that showed steady growth.

Out of Accenture

Accenture owned Duck Creek until August 2016, when it sold control to the private equity firm Apax and kept a large stake. The company sold to insurers of every size. Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance, founded in 2013 with no IT systems of its own, used Duck Creek to launch more than forty products in eighteen months. The bet was that insurers would rather rent their core systems than build them.

Bought Back for Nineteen

Duck Creek sold 15 million shares at $27 each in August 2020 and listed on Nasdaq as DCT. After the IPO, Apax and Accenture still controlled a majority of the votes. The stock fell as growth slowed. In January 2023 Duck Creek agreed to sell itself to Vista Equity Partners. The deal closed on March 30, 2023, and shareholders received $19 a share in cash, below the IPO price.

Cover: Mandarin Ducks and Lotus, Ren Yi. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for ducks on a creek.