A former Anduril engineer raises $42 million to build Amazon from composite parts

Before Zach Eakin sold out to 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 — allowed him to form a workshop.

Eakin told TechCrunch that he got different feedback from each. Grimm helped him think about how to pitch venture capital, Schimpf (CEO of Anduril) pushed him on strategy, and Luckey, a lifelong fundraiser, guided him on storytelling.

This mini training program 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-use 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 respectable sum for the Huntington Beach, Calif., startup, which employs only 60 or so people. A lot of it will go towards people. Layup Parts used most of its seed money for capital expenditures. Eakin wants to use the new funding to grow the startup’s ranks and move to a larger facility this year. The goal is to make ordering custom parts made from carbon fiber or fiberglass as easy as if they were sold on Amazon.

Eakin has been working with composite materials for about two decades, dating back to his time in motorsports, Eakin told TechCrunch. The engineer began his career at Chip Ganassi Racing, where he worked with carbon fiber bodies and bodies, particularly for the company’s IndyCar entries and the radical (and radically controversial) DeltaWing prototype.

Eakin took a bit of a detour to become the first engineer at Elon Musk’s Boring Company in 2017. But by 2021, he was once again deep into composite materials when he took that position at Anduril.

At that point, Eakin realized how, during his time as a tunneler, something of a revolution had begun in the worlds of manufacturing and fabrication. Startups like SendCutSend and Protolabs have dramatically reduced the time and cost needed to design prototypes and ship parts to customers. But no one was doing that for vehicles, he said.

“It occurred to me that all other manufacturing sectors are improving; [and] “We’re struggling to find people to make our composite parts for us,” Eakin said. “Why isn’t someone trying to make this better?”

It’s not that Eakin didn’t know the answer. Composite materials tend to be more difficult to work with overall — or, as he puts it, “there are a lot more fingers and eyeballs involved.” In addition, there have been a lot of mergers between compound companies, according to Eakin.

This meant that larger companies were less likely to try to innovate and risk their reliable revenue sources. Even if they wanted to, he said, these companies don’t have the software talent to build the tools required to reach that goal of a one-click or even no-click solution.

“If we have materials stored, and you have a good understanding of those materials, we can create software that reduces the amount of clicks it takes for an engineer to produce those materials — and ultimately zero clicks, as it just takes the customer data and outputs the shapes,” he said with a smile.

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

“I just decided that this might be the best thing I could do for Anduril, is to fix this 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 past two years since Eakin founded Layup Parts, his team has been rapidly prototyping and producing parts for a variety of customers, including motorsports, design studios that build show cars, and even pickleball paddle companies. The company has already reduced the time between receiving customer data and manufacturing a part from weeks to hours in some cases.

Unsurprisingly, the largest lines of business are aviation and defence. This includes startups and more traditional defense primes, according to Eakin.

The opportunity is clear in the cap table. There is major backer Marlinspike, which has already invested in Anduril and a number of other defense-focused manufacturers. Cerberus Ventures was started in 2023 by Chris Darby, who spent nearly 20 years running the CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel.

While Eakin looks back fondly on what he learned from Anduril and its leaders, he also carries over the skills he learned at The Boring Company. Although he doesn’t work with composites there, he said a lot still applies to startups. Working at The Boring Company involves a lot of “first-principles engineering stuff, very similar to what we would do in racing,” he said.

“Elon has a very high sense of urgency, so as much as it was a new kind of thing to get done, he was getting used to crazy deadlines and developing things as quickly as possible,” he said.