Former Anduril engineer raises $42 million to build Amazon of composite parts

Zach Eakin practiced at Palmer Lackey before selling his new startup investors.

When Eakin left Lucky’s defense startup Anduril in 2024 to start a new composites company called Layup Parts, Lucky brought him into a workshop with Anduril co-founders Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm.

Eakin told TechCrunch that he got different feedback from each. Mr. Grimm helped figure out how to pitch to venture capital, Mr. Schimpf (Anduril’s CEO) gave him guidance on strategy, and Mr. Lackey, a former fund raiser, coached him on storytelling.

This miniature bootcamp seems to have worked. Two years ago, Ekin raised a $9 million seed round. The company announced Tuesday that it has raised an additional $42 million in a Series A funding round led by dual-use venture fund Marlinspike, with participation from new investors Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners, and existing backers Founders Fund and Lux ​​Capital.

That’s a lot of money for a Huntington Beach, Calif., startup with just 60 employees. And a lot of it will be directed at people. Layup Parts used most of the seed money for capital expenditures. Eakin hopes to use the new funding to improve the startup’s standing and move into a larger facility this year. The goal is to make it as easy to order custom carbon fiber or fiberglass parts as if they were sold on Amazon.

Eakin told TechCrunch he has been working with composite materials for about 20 years, dating back to his days in motorsports. The engineer began his professional career at Chip Ganassi Racing, where he was responsible for the carbon fiber structures and bodywork, most notably for the company’s IndyCar entries and radical (and radically controversial) Deltawing prototypes.

Eakin took a bit of a detour before becoming Elon Musk’s Boring Company’s first engineer in 2017. But by 2021, he was back to working hard on composites when he took on a role at Anduril.

At that point, Eakin realized how, while digging the tunnel, something of a revolution had begun in the world of industrial manufacturing and manufacturing. Startups like SendCutSend and Protolabs have significantly reduced the time and cost required to create prototypes and ship parts to customers. But no one had done this with composite materials, he said.

“I somehow realized that all the other manufacturing industries were improving as well. [and] “We’re having a hard time finding people to make composite parts. Why isn’t anyone trying to improve this?” Eakin said.

Not that Eakin didn’t know the answer. In general, composite materials tend to be difficult to work with. That means, in his words, “you need more fingers and more eyeballs.” Additionally, Eakin says there was a lot of consolidation among conglomerates.

This meant that large companies were less likely to risk a reliable source of revenue by trying to innovate. And even if they wanted to, he said, these companies don’t have the software talent to build the tools needed to achieve the goal of one-click or even zero-click solutions.

“If you have materials in stock, and you understand them well, you can build software that reduces the amount of clicks that engineers need to create them by an order of magnitude. Eventually you get to zero clicks, where you just take the customer data and output the geometry,” he said with a smile.

Eakin said it became clear that the best way to do this was to start an entirely new composites company, and these challenges made the idea even more valuable.

“I decided that the best thing I could do for Anduril was to fix this part of the supply chain, because I don’t think this is just an Anduril problem,” he said.

So far, he was right. In the two years since Eakin founded Layup Parts, his team has rapidly prototyped and produced parts for a variety of customers, including motorsports, a design studio that builds show cars, and even a pickleball paddle company. The company has already reduced the time from receiving customer data to manufacturing parts from weeks to, in some cases, hours.

Unsurprisingly, the largest business area is aerospace and defense. Eakin said this includes both startups and more traditional defense companies.

That opportunity is clear when you look at the cap table. Key backers include Merlinspike, which has already invested in Anduril and a number of other defense-focused manufacturing companies. Cerberus Ventures was founded in 2023 by Chris Darby, who ran the CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel for nearly 20 years.

While Eakin looks back fondly on what he learned from Anduril and its leaders, he also carries over the skills he learned at The Bowling Company. Despite not working with composites there, much still applies to the startup, he said. His work at The Boring Company involved a lot of “first-principles engineering work, very similar to what we do in racing,” he said.

“Elon has a very high sense of urgency, so he was used to creating new types of things, but also crazy deadlines and developing as quickly as possible,” he said.