Layup Parts raises $42M Series A led by Marlinspike to build the Amazon of composite parts
What's the deal? Layup Parts, a Huntington Beach, California startup founded by former Anduril engineer Zack EakinDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, has raised $42M in a Series A led by dual-use venture fund MarlinspikeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. Cerberus VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Pinegrove Venture PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Founders Fund, and LUX Capital also participated. The company, which employs around 60 people, wants to make ordering custom carbon fibre and fiberglass parts as simple as buying something on Amazon.
Eakin raised US$5.82M seed round two years ago and plans to use the new funding to hire and move into a bigger facility this year.
Why now? During Eakin's time at Anduril, he noticed that startups like SendCutSend and Protolabs had slashed the time and cost of prototyping and shipping parts across many manufacturing verticals — but nobody had done this for composites. "All these other manufacturing verticals are getting better, we are struggling to find people to make our composite parts for us," Eakin told TechCrunch.
Consolidation among composite companies made the gap worse. Bigger firms had little incentive to innovate and lacked the software talent to build the tools needed for a streamlined ordering process. Eakin saw an opening to build a new kind of composites company from scratch — one that uses software to reduce the clicks between a customer's design data and a finished part to as close to zero as possible.
What could go wrong? Composites are inherently harder to work with than metals or plastics — "a lot more fingers and eyeballs involved," as Eakin put it. Scaling a manufacturing operation that relies on complex materials while simultaneously building sophisticated software is a dual challenge. The company is still small, and much of its earlier funding went to capital expenditures rather than growth.
The signal: Layup Parts' investor line-up — Founders Fund and Lux Capital returning alongside dual-use specialist Marlinspike and defence-adjacent Cerberus Ventures — underscores how deeply the defence-tech funding wave is now reaching into manufacturing infrastructure, not just end platforms. The early-growth company's jump from US$5.82M seed to US$27.2M Series A in two years suggests investors see the composites supply chain as a bottleneck worth solving at scale, particularly as demand from aerospace, defence, and advanced mobility programmes intensifies.
Read more: TechCrunch
