Layup Parts makes custom carbon-fiber and fiberglass parts easier to order online, and it just raised a $42 million Series A to scale that pitch. The Huntington Beach startup is attacking a stubborn manufacturing bottleneck: composite parts still too often mean slow quoting and too much manual back-and-forth. Then come the long waits before anything gets built. CEO Zack Eakin founded Layup Parts in 2024 after working in composites across motorsports, The Boring Company, and Anduril. On June 2, 2026, the company said the new round would help it hire more people and move into a larger facility this year.
What is Layup Parts and how does it work?
Layup Parts is trying to turn composite-part ordering into a software workflow. Its customer-facing system, FiberPortal, starts with a file upload. From there, a customer can configure the part by choosing material and marking A and B sides. They can also add plies, set ply direction, and include special requirements before getting an interactive quote.
The quoting flow is more specific than the usual “contact sales” black box. FiberPortal shows pricing for tooling and parts. The buyer can choose lead-time tiers that change the final price. After checkout, parts arrive with QC data. Cure logs and out-life tracking are available inside the portal.
That matters because Layup isn’t just brokering capacity. It has a defined stack of materials and in-house manufacturing capabilities around composite production. Those include stocked carbon-fiber and fiberglass options, plus core materials like Rohacell and Nomex honeycomb. It also offers CNC machining and out-of-autoclave curing. Compression molding, in-autoclave curing, and large-format 3D printing are part of the mix too. The company is also DDTC registered, ITAR compliant, and lists AS9100D and ISO 9001:2015 certifications.
The before-and-after pitch is blunt. Layup says traditional timelines run 2 to 6 months from start to finish, while its own process can get to about 2 weeks. Back in its 2024 seed round, Eakin framed the ambition even more aggressively, saying small parts could come back in 3 days and that Layup aimed to be 10x faster, with tooling and upfront costs cut in half. Big promise. It’s also the right one for engineers who care more about lead time than brand slogans.
How did Layup Parts start, and who founded it?
The founding story
Layup Parts came out of a practical frustration. Eakin left Anduril in 2024 after deciding that composites had missed the digitization wave that already transformed other manufacturing categories. Before he went out to raise money, he pressure-tested the pitch with Palmer Luckey, Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf, and co-founder Matt Grimm. He got feedback on fundraising and strategy. He also sharpened the storytelling before taking it to investors.
The company itself was founded by Zack Eakin, Hanno Kappen, and Elisa Suarez, who originally met while working at The Boring Company. That origin story matters because this isn’t a founder trio that wandered into hard tech from software. They’ve spent years around industrial systems and hardware execution. They know deadlines.
Why Eakin fits this category
Eakin’s market fit is unusually strong. He’d already spent about 2 decades around composites, starting in motorsports at Chip Ganassi Racing, where he worked on carbon-fiber structures and bodywork for IndyCar programs and the DeltaWing prototype. He became The Boring Company’s first engineer in 2017. Then he joined Anduril in 2021, where he led mechanical design work on drone products including Roadrunner.
Kappen and Suarez round out the operating side. After The Boring Company, Kappen worked at Stellar Pizza, while Suarez held roles at Rivian and Heliogen. That mix gives Layup something a lot of manufacturing startups don’t have early on: one founder obsessed with the process physics, plus co-founders who’ve already lived through messy operations.
Early traction and fundraising
Layup is no longer a deck and a demo. It’s live, has a customer login flow, and serves customers from prototyping through production. Eakin told TechCrunch the company has already cut the time from receiving customer data to manufacturing a part from weeks to hours in some cases. It’s producing for motorsports teams and design studios building show cars. It also works with pickleball paddle companies, aerospace startups, and traditional defense primes. The team is about 60 people.
The funding path has been fast even by hardware standards. Layup raised a $9 million seed round in May 2024 led by Founders Fund, with Lux Capital and Haystack also participating. On June 2, 2026, it announced a $42 million Series A. Marlinspike led the round, with Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners joining, while Founders Fund and Lux returned. Based on those disclosed rounds, Layup has now raised $51 million.
Where Layup sits against competitors
The cleanest way to understand Layup is to look at what already exists — and what doesn’t. Eakin has pointed to Protolabs, Xometry, and Fictiv as examples of companies that made CNC machining and sheet metal feel fast. Injection molding got there too. Composites stayed stuck in a slower, more artisanal process.
There are also adjacent services nibbling at pieces of the workflow. Xometry offers carbon-fiber laser cutting inside a much broader on-demand manufacturing marketplace. SendCutSend handles sheet fabrication and CNC routing, including work on composites and laser-cut carbon fiber. Protolabs runs digital manufacturing services across CNC, molding, and 3D printing. Layup’s bet is narrower and more vertical: composite-specific configuration and quoting. Tooling, manufacturing, and quality records sit in the same system. That’s a tougher build. It’s also why investors care.
Why does Layup Parts' $42M Series A matter?
This round matters because it changes the company’s posture. The seed money mostly went into capital expenditures — equipment, factory buildout, the boring but necessary stuff. Eakin says this new capital will lean much more toward headcount and a larger facility. That usually means the first-generation factory thesis is already far enough along that the next bottleneck is people, throughput, and software depth.
It also tells you what investors think they’re buying. Not just a composite shop. They’re betting on a domestic manufacturing layer for aerospace and defense customers that want speed, traceability, and compliance without the old-school quoting circus. Marlinspike’s broader dual-use focus matters here. So do Cerberus Ventures’ defense ties and Layup’s ITAR and AS9100D posture.
There’s also a subtle shift here. In 2024, the pitch was mostly about proving composite ordering could be digitized at all. In 2026, the question is whether Layup can turn that into repeatable, scaled production. That’s harder.
What market is Layup Parts betting on?
The macro setup is pretty good. IMARC pegs the U.S. aerospace composites market at $7.6 billion in 2025 and expects it to reach $13.0 billion by 2034. Grand View Research says the layup process held 36.7% of composites market revenue in 2025, while carbon-fiber composites are forecast to grow at a 9.3% CAGR and compression molding at 8.3%. That lines up almost suspiciously well with Layup’s material mix and manufacturing methods.
The industry is also still dealing with old structural problems. ACMA’s 2026 state-of-industry report says 77% of surveyed composites companies ranked employee retention, turnover, and replacing retired talent as extremely or very important issues. The same report flagged continuing lead-time volatility for carbon fiber reinforcements and epoxy resins. Demand is there. So is the operational mess.
Is Layup Parts building the Amazon for composites?
That line sounds a little glib, but the core idea is real. Layup Parts isn’t trying to invent a new material. It’s trying to make one stubborn corner of advanced manufacturing behave more like modern commerce — faster quoting and clearer specs. Shorter lead times help too. Better records are part of the pitch.
Now it has the money to see whether that works at scale. The next thing to watch isn’t another flashy funding headline. It’s whether Layup Parts can turn fast-turn prototype work into steady aerospace and defense production programs.
Read how ProLearn AI raised ₹30 Cr in a pre-seed round led by BEENEXT to build an AI-native learning platform for K-12 students with personalized exam prep and real-time tutoring.
FAQ
- What funding did Layup Parts just raise? Layup Parts raised a $42 million Series A announced on June 2, 2026. Marlinspike led the round, with Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners joining, while Founders Fund and Lux Capital also participated again. That follows a $9 million seed round in May 2024, bringing disclosed funding to $51 million.
- How does Layup Parts work for customers? Customers use FiberPortal to upload a model, configure materials and ply details, and get an interactive quote that changes with lead time. After ordering, they can track quality-control records, cure logs, and out-life information through the same system. It’s a much more structured workflow than the usual composite-shop process of emails, manual quoting, and delayed feedback.
- Who founded Layup Parts? Layup Parts was founded in 2024 by Zack Eakin, Hanno Kappen, and Elisa Suarez. The three met at The Boring Company, and Eakin later went on to Anduril, where he worked on drone products, while Kappen and Suarez added operating experience from Stellar Pizza, Rivian, and Heliogen. It’s a founding team built around industrial execution, not just software packaging.
- Is Layup Parts a defense tech company or a composite manufacturing startup? It’s more accurate to call Layup an advanced composite manufacturing startup with strong aerospace and defense exposure. Eakin says aerospace and defense are already the company’s biggest business lines, but it also serves motorsports, show-car design work, and even pickleball paddle brands. The product is about making carbon-fiber and fiberglass part production faster, not about selling a defense system itself.
