Just five months after its founding, the hard-tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million funding round led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack also participated.
The breakneck pace is more than a subtle sign that investors’ appetite for tech-focused solutions to the woes of America’s industrial base isn’t waning. However, Layup was able to close a large round of funding so quickly, at least in part, because the founders themselves have deep experience with the issues plaguing domestic manufacturing.
Layup was founded by Zack Eakin, Hanno Kappen and Elisa Suarez. the trio met while working at The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s idiosyncratic effort to transform transportation using tunnels. Capen went on to work at the robotic pizzeria Stellar Pizza, while Suarez had stints at the company Rivian and the renewable energy company Heliogen.
Eakin, CEO of Layup, moved to Anduril in 2021 as director of engineering. He led the engineering design of the company’s line of flying drone products, including the Roadrunner, which was simply “a Palmer [Luckey] idea when I started,” he said in a recent interview.
Eakin would still be with Anduril, he says, if it weren’t for the idea to found Layup. “It was born out of a need we had at Anduril – a need that people have that became painful during my time there,” he said.
Most areas of manufacturing have changed during Eakin’s career, except composites, he said. Companies like Protolabs, Xometry, and Fictiv have innovative processes like CNC machining, sheet metal cutting, and injection molding. These companies (and many others) have developed a frictionless, almost Amazon-like experience to build hardware quickly, and this has left a lasting mark on the industry.
But there is no corresponding innovation in the manufacture of complex components. There are a few reasons for this, Eakin said. The first is that existing composites manufacturers don’t have the ability to develop the software tools needed to do it well. The other is that composites are more technical and less easily automatable at certain stages of the process. So getting the number of people in the production cycle close to zero is inherently more difficult.
The Roadrunner is a good example: It has a lot of complex parts, but getting those parts is time-consuming and expensive. It’s normal for an engineer to have to wait up to two weeks to get a quote back from a manufacturer (as opposed to 10 minutes with a service like Protolabs). after the supplier cuts a purchase order, the wait stretches to perhaps a week or two for a small and simple part, up to four or five months for something more complex or large.
Instead, Layup aims to return small parts in three days, and for larger parts, the company aims for two weeks — all at a lower cost to the customer. “I think we can be 10 times faster, and in terms of tooling and upfront cost, we can be half of what you would typically pay today,” Eakin estimated.
In general, Eakin didn’t seem too concerned with the competition. Many of the top composites companies are owned by polyethylene companies, and those companies tend to focus on larger, long-term contracts rather than faster development programs, he said.
“I believe the long-term, high-value contracts of tomorrow are in development today,” he said. “If you work with people in development and you understand their needs and you can deliver them quality parts, you’re going to provide better service and put yourself in a better position to get those contracts by focusing on something that might make less sense in a room meetings, which focuses on growth and speed”.
Most of the work ahead for the company, and where it will be able to differentiate most strongly, is in software, although it will likely be a few years before Layup can accept any CAD models from customers and deliver part in a matter of days. But that doesn’t mean the company isn’t moving fast: With the new funding, Layup aims to build an electronic parts factory for customers by the end of the third quarter of this year.
That means the $9 million will go mostly toward capital expenditures like a bigger building and more equipment, as well as hiring both the software side and factory floor technicians.
There has been much talk—often frenzied—from Silicon Valley about the many ills facing the U.S. industrial base, including an aging workforce and an overreliance on tribal knowledge. But Eakin said what really motivates him is thinking about all the engineering students who want to build but face high barriers to entry because of antiquated processes. Layup wants to change that.
“The idea of being able to offer that to young students so they can realize the things they want to build — that’s the thing that really gets me excited about what we’re doing. That’s the thing that I think has happened in all these other areas of construction, and composites have been left behind. Whether or not we fix a supply chain, it’s aging demographics, that’s cool. We’ll do that too. That’s wonderful. What gets me excited is the ability to bring good complex components and make them available to all people.”
