Layup Parts raises $42 million to make custom composites easy to order

Layup Parts raised $42 million in Series A funding as it tries to make custom carbon-fiber and fiberglass parts as easy to order as consumer goods, a promise aimed squarely at one of manufacturing’s slowest corners. The Huntington Beach, California, startup said the round was led by Marlinspike, with new investors Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners, and existing backers Founders Fund and LUX Capital.

The company’s bet is that composites matter too much to remain stuck in a manual, fragmented supply chain. Zack Eakin, who founded Layup with Hanno Kappen and Elisa Suarez, said he has spent about two decades working with composite materials, starting in motorsports before moving through Chip Ganassi Racing, The Boring Company and Anduril. Kappen and Suarez met Eakin while they were all at The Boring Company, and the trio launched Layup after Eakin left Anduril in 2024, where he had been director of mechanical engineering and led mechanical design work on products including Roadrunner.

Layup is trying to solve a practical problem that can slow defense, aerospace and other industrial programs: sourcing composite parts can still take far longer than ordering CNC machined or sheet metal components. Eakin said engineers can wait up to two weeks just to get a quote for a composite part, then another one to two weeks for a small simple part after a purchase order, or as long as four or five months for a larger or more complex component. He argued that companies such as Protolabs, Xometry, Fictiv and SendCutSend have made other manufacturing categories faster and more software-driven, while composites have lagged because they are harder to automate, still rely heavily on manual labor and have seen consolidation that reduced pressure on incumbents.

The startup’s own experience suggests how capital-intensive the business can be. Eakin said Layup used most of its $9 million seed round, raised in 2024, on capital expenditures. The company now employs about 60 people and plans to use the new money to hire more staff, expand into a larger facility this year and build out both software and factory capacity.

Layup’s early product, Roadrunner, illustrates the challenge it says it is built to attack. The system includes many composite components that are time-consuming and expensive to source, which is exactly the bottleneck Layup wants to remove. Eakin also said Palmer Luckey, Anduril chief executive Brian Schimpf and co-founder Matt Grimm gave him pitch feedback before the funding push, underscoring how closely the company’s message is tied to the defense-tech ecosystem.