No, it is independent, but according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo, the company "...earns revenue by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network and through affiliate relationships with Amazon and eBay."
From the same source:
DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources,[8] including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.[3][8][9][10] It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.[10][11]
Thanks. I use DuckDuckGo exclusively.