Before Zack Eakin sold investors on his new startup, he interned at Palmer Luckey.
When Eakin left Luckey’s defense startup Anduril in 2024 to start a new composites company called Layup Parts, Luckey — along with Anduril co-founders Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm — let him work on the field.
He got different feedback from everyone, Eakin told TechCrunch. Grimm helped him think about how to pitch VCs, Schimpf (Anduril’s CEO) pushed him on strategy, while Luckey – ever the fundraiser – guided him on storytelling.
This miniature boot camp seems to have worked. Two years ago, Eakin raised a $9 million seed round. The startup announced Tuesday that it has raised another $42 million in a Series A funding round led by dual-purpose venture fund Marlinspike, with participation from new investors Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners and existing backers Founders Fund and Lux Capital.
It’s a tidy sum for the Huntington Beach, Calif., startup, which employs just about 60 people. And much of it will go to the people. Layup Parts used most of its money for capital expenditures. Eakin wants to use the new funding to grow the startup’s ranks and move into a larger facility this year. The goal is to make ordering carbon fiber or fiberglass parts as easy as if they were being sold on Amazon.
Eakin has been working with composites for about two decades, dating back to his days in motorsports, he told TechCrunch. The engineer began his professional career at Chip Ganassi Racing, where he worked with carbon fiber structures and bodywork specifically for the company’s IndyCar entries and the radical (and radically controversial) Prototype DeltaWing.
Eakin took a detour to become the first engineer at Elon Musk’s Boring Company in 2017. But by 2021, he was deep in composites again when he took the role at Anduril.
It was at that point that Eakin realized how, during his time digging tunnels, something of a revolution had begun in the world of industrial construction and manufacturing. Startups like SendCutSend and Protolabs had dramatically reduced the time and cost required to build prototypes and ship parts to customers. But no one was doing that for composites, he said.
“I just realized that, like, all these other production companies are getting better, [and] we struggle to find people to build our composite parts for us,” Eakin said. “Why isn’t anyone trying to make this better?”
It’s not like Eakin didn’t know the answer. Composites tend to be more difficult to handle in general—or, as he put it, “a lot more fingers and eyeballs are involved.” In addition, there has been a lot of consolidation among the composite companies, according to Eakin.
This meant that larger companies were less likely to try to innovate and risk their reliable revenue streams. And even if they wanted to, he said, these companies don’t have the software talent to build the tools needed to achieve that goal of getting to a one-click or even zero-click solution.
“If we have stock materials and you have a good understanding of those materials, we can create software that has an order of magnitude reduction in the number of clicks it takes for an engineer to produce them — and eventually it gets to zero clicks, where it just takes customer data and makes shapes,” he said with a smile.
Eakin said it became apparent that the best way to do this was to start an entirely new composites company, and that these challenges made the idea even more valuable.
“I just decided this might be the best thing I can do for Anduril, is to fix that part of the supply chain, because I don’t think it’s 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, design studios that build show cars, and even pickleball paddle companies. The company has already cut the time between receiving customer data and manufacturing a part from weeks to hours in some cases.
The biggest business sectors, unsurprisingly, are aerospace and defense. That includes both startups and more traditional defense initiatives, according to Eakin.
The opportunity is evident in the chapter table. There’s lead backer Marlinspike, which has already invested in Anduril and a number of other defense-focused manufacturing companies. Cerberus Ventures was started in 2023 by Chris Darby, who spent nearly 20 years running the CIA-backed venture capital firm In-Q-Tel.
While Eakin looks back fondly on what he learned from Anduril and his leaders, he also carries skills he learned to The Boring Company. Despite not working with complex products there, he said a lot still applies to a startup. Working at The Boring Company involved a lot of “first principles technical stuff, similar to what we would do in racing,” he said.
“Elon has a very high sense of urgency, so even though it was a new kind of thing, he felt familiar with crazy deadlines and just developing things as fast as you can,” he said.
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