How an Ex-Anduril Engineer Is Rewriting the Rules for Manufacturing Carbon Fiber

Before Zack Eakin ever pitched outside investors on his new startup, he practiced his presentation on Palmer Luckey. Eakin left Luckey’s defense tech company, Anduril, back in 2024 to start a new manufacturing company called Layup Parts. Luckey, along with Anduril co-founders Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm, let Eakin workshop his business pitch directly with them. Each founder gave different advice. Grimm focused on how to pitch venture capital firms, Schimpf pushed hard on business strategy, and Luckey guided him on how to tell a compelling story.

This informal training camp clearly paid off. Two years ago, Eakin secured a nine million dollar seed funding round. Now, his startup just announced a massive forty-two million dollar Series A funding round. The investment was led by a dual-use venture fund called Marlinspike, with heavy participation from new investors Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners. Existing backers Founders Fund and Lux Capital also joined the round.

That is a huge amount of cash for a startup based in Huntington Beach, California, that only employs about sixty people. Eakin plans to spend most of this new capital on equipment and machinery. Layup Parts will also use the money to grow its team and move into a much larger manufacturing facility later this year. The ultimate goal is to make ordering custom parts made of carbon fiber or fiberglass just as easy as ordering a book on Amazon.

Eakin has spent around twenty years working with composite materials, tracing back to his early days in motorsports. He started his career at Chip Ganassi Racing, working directly on carbon-fiber structures and bodywork for racing vehicles. He worked on IndyCar entries and even helped build the radically different DeltaWing prototype race car.

He took a brief detour in 2017 to become the first engineer hired at Elon Musk’s Boring Company. By 2021, he returned to advanced materials when he joined Anduril. During his time digging tunnels for Musk, Eakin noticed a major shift in industrial fabrication. Companies like SendCutSend and Protolabs completely changed how engineers order metal and plastic parts. They slashed the time and cost required to prototype and ship custom hardware. However, nobody had brought that same automated speed to advanced composite materials.

Eakin realized that while other manufacturing sectors were improving, engineers still struggled to get high-quality carbon fiber parts made quickly. Composites are notoriously difficult to handle, requiring significant manual labor and specialized knowledge. At the same time, the composite industry went through massive corporate consolidation. Big, established manufacturing firms lost their appetite for risk and innovation because they preferred to protect their predictable revenue streams. Even if they wanted to automate, they lacked the specialized software required to simplify the process.

Layup Parts solves this by combining material inventory with custom software. By keeping raw stock materials on hand and building intelligent automation tools, the company dramatically cuts down the time it takes to engineer and manufacture a part. Instead of waiting weeks, customers can get their parts in days. Over the last two years, the team has built prototypes and production parts for automotive designers, aerospace firms, and even pickleball paddle makers.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest business opportunities for the startup live in the defense and aerospace sectors. The venture firms backing the company reflect this reality. Lead investor Marlinspike already holds investments in Anduril, while Cerberus Ventures was started by a veteran who spent nearly two decades running the CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel. Eakin still relies heavily on the engineering principles he learned from his time at Anduril and The Boring Company, noting that working under Musk gave him a fierce sense of urgency that helps him build hardware fast.