Layup Parts
Assembly Line
Founders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts
Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack also participated. Eakin, Layup’s CEO, would still be with Anduril, he says, if not for the idea to found Layup. “It was born out of a need that we had at Anduril — a need that the world has that became poignant during my time there,” he said.
Most areas of manufacturing have changed over the course of Eakin’s career, except composites, he said. Companies like Protolabs, Xometry and Fictiv have innovated processes like CNC-machining, sheet metal cutting and injection molding. These companies (and many others) have developed a frictionless, almost Amazon-like experience to getting hardware manufactured rapidly, and that’s left a permanent mark on the industry.
But there’s been no equivalent innovation in composite parts manufacturing. There are a few reasons for this, Eakin said. The first is that existing composites manufacturers aren’t well leveraged to develop the software tools required to do it well; the other is that composites are more artisanal and less easily automatable in certain steps of the process. So bringing the number of humans in the manufacturing loop close to zero is inherently more tricky.