When you think about the hardest problems in manufacturing, carbon fiber composites probably aren’t the first thing that comes to mind. But ask any aerospace engineer, defense contractor, or even a pickleball paddle maker, and they’ll tell you a different story: sourcing custom composite parts is still stuck in the dark ages of phone calls, long lead times, and sky-high minimums. That gap between what digital manufacturing has done for metal and plastic parts versus what it hasn’t done for composites is exactly what caught Zack Eakin’s attention.
The Huntington Beach, California-based startup Layup Parts just closed a $42 million Series A led by dual-use venture fund Marlinspike, with participation from Cerberus Ventures, Pinegrove Venture Partners, Founders Fund, and Lux Capital. The company, founded by former Anduril engineer Zack Eakin, has a simple-sounding mission that turns out to be incredibly hard: make ordering custom carbon fiber or fiberglass parts as easy as buying something on Amazon.
The Manufacturing Paradox Nobody Solved
Over the past decade, startups like SendCutSend and Protolabs have transformed how engineers prototype metal and plastic parts. Upload a design, pick your material, and a part shows up at your door in days. It’s become so seamless that engineers now take it for granted. But composites? A completely different story.
Eakin spent two decades working with composite materials, starting in motorsports at Chip Ganassi Racing before stints at The Boring Company and eventually Anduril. At Anduril, he watched the rest of manufacturing get faster and more accessible while composites remained stubbornly manual. “All these other manufacturing verticals are getting better, and we are struggling to find people to make our composite parts for us,” he told TechCrunch.
The reasons are structural. Composite manufacturing requires more hands-on labor, more eyeballs on quality, and more institutional knowledge than CNC machining or 3D printing. The industry also consolidated heavily over the years, leaving a handful of large players with little incentive to innovate. They have dependable revenue streams, and building the software tools to automate composite manufacturing requires a type of engineering talent these legacy firms simply don’t have.
From Defense Need to Commercial Opportunity
What makes Layup Parts compelling is its origin story. Eakin didn’t start the company because he saw a market opportunity first. He started it because he saw a supply chain failure at Anduril that he believed he could fix. “I just decided this might be the best thing I can do for Anduril, is to go fix this part of the supply chain,” he said. That’s a classic playbook from the defense tech world: solve a hard internal problem, spin it out, and suddenly it’s a commercial product with a built-in anchor customer.
The strategy is already showing results. Layup Parts has cut the time between receiving customer data and manufacturing a part from weeks to hours in some cases. Their customer base spans motorsports, automotive design studios, consumer goods (pickleball paddles), and unsurprisingly, aerospace and defense. The company has been operating with just 60 employees and plans to use the fresh capital to scale headcount and move into a larger facility this year.
Why This Matters for Manufacturing Startups
The broader lesson here is about digital transformation in industries that have been left behind. The playbook that companies like Amazon applied to retail and that Protolabs applied to CNC machining is now arriving for composites, and the timing couldn’t be better. Defense spending is at historic highs, aerospace supply chains are desperate for redundancy, and the commercial drone and eVTOL markets are hungry for lightweight structural parts at scale.
For startup founders, Layup Parts represents a blueprint worth studying. Eakin didn’t invent a new material or a revolutionary manufacturing process. He took an existing, mature industry and applied software logic and operational discipline to it. That’s a repeatable pattern: find a $10 billion market where the incumbents are profitable but complacent, where customers complain about friction but nobody has the software DNA to fix it, and build the modern version yourself.
The cap table tells its own story. Marlinspike, Founders Fund, and Lux Capital don’t invest in manufacturing for manufacturing’s sake. They’re betting that software-defined supply chains will reshape aerospace and defense the same way they reshaped logistics and retail. With $42 million in new funding and a founding team forged at Anduril and The Boring Company, Layup Parts just became one of the most interesting bets in that thesis.
Source: TechCrunch
