Zack Eakin has a story he likes to tell about lead times. At his previous job—director of mechanical engineering at Anduril, the defense tech startup—he'd send out CAD files for carbon fiber brackets and fairings, then wait. Two months, sometimes three. Occasionally six. The parts would arrive eventually, expensive and correct, but by then the prototype cycle had already moved on.
Now, from a facility in Huntington Beach, California, Eakin is betting he can collapse that timeline to days. His company, Layup Parts, announced a $42 million Series A on June 2, 2026, with a pitch that sounds almost too straightforward: upload a design, pick from a menu of aerospace-grade materials, and receive finished composite parts before traditional suppliers can return a quote.
The round was led by Marlinspike, a Washington, D.C.-area dual-use venture fund, with Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners joining as new investors. Founders Fund and Lux Capital, both in from the company's $9 million seed round in May 2024, returned. Layup employed around 60 people at the time of the announcement.
Whether the model scales beyond early adopters—or whether defense primes and aerospace OEMs, famously cautious about re-qualifying suppliers, will embrace a startup promising turnarounds measured in weeks rather than quarters—remains an open question. But for now, at least, someone is willing to fund the experiment.
The Composites Bottleneck
The problem Eakin is chasing isn't new. Composite parts—carbon fiber, fiberglass, honeycomb cores—are everywhere in modern aerospace and defense hardware. They're light, strong, and increasingly essential as aircraft designers chase fuel efficiency and drone makers chase payload capacity. But the supply base hasn't kept pace. Most shops still operate the way they did decades ago: manual layups, autoclaves that run overnight, lead times that stretch into months.
Layup's approach borrows from the Protolabs playbook. (Eakin has cited the on-demand metalworking platform, along with Xometry and Fictiv, as inspiration.) The company built what it calls the "FiberPortal," a quoting system that constrains material and process choices to a known set of automatable workflows. Customers pick from in-stock aerospace-grade prepregs—T700S carbon fiber with #2510 resin, IM7 with MTC400-1, S-glass, Nomex honeycomb—and receive an interactive quote with tiered lead times. Faster costs more. No minimums.
The target? Two weeks, sometimes less. Eakin told TechCrunch the company has pushed delivery down to hours in certain cases, though he didn't specify how often that happens or under what conditions.
Everything is manufactured in-house at Huntington Beach. Layup holds AS9100D and ISO 9001:2015 certifications, is ITAR compliant and DDTC registered, and has invested in precision CNC machining (up to 16 feet long), out-of-autoclave curing, compression molding, and large-format 3D printing. The portal tracks cure logs and out-life data, the kind of traceability aerospace customers expect.
Who's Buying
The customer mix is wider than you might expect. Motorsports teams. Design studios prototyping concept cars. Pickleball paddle manufacturers, somehow. But the real revenue, Eakin says, comes from aerospace and defense—including prime contractors, though the company hasn't named names.
That's where Marlinspike's involvement makes sense. The fund focuses on dual-use technologies, and Cerberus Ventures—launched in 2023 by Chris Darby, former CEO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm—joined the round as well. Pinegrove Venture Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture and growth secondaries platform, also participated.
The timing aligns with broader market tailwinds, though the numbers are big enough to invite skepticism. The advanced composites market was valued at roughly $31.7 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $56.1 billion by 2033, according to a March report. Carbon fiber demand, driven by aerospace, offshore wind, and vehicle lightweighting, is expected to grow from $5.7 billion to $10.1 billion over the same stretch.
Yet for all that projected growth, the supply chain remains fragmented and labor-intensive. Lead times, for the most part, haven't budged.
The Scale Question
Layup plans to use the fresh capital to hire and move into a larger facility later in 2026. The company's Lever careers page lists openings across hardware, operations, production, and software—roles in computational geometry and composite manufacturing engineering, among others.
The harder question is whether the model can handle volume without reverting to industry-standard timelines. Defense primes are slow to re-qualify suppliers, and aerospace OEMs don't bet their production schedules on unproven vendors. Layup will need to demonstrate that speed and quality aren't in tension, and that a two-week turnaround today won't stretch to six weeks when order volume doubles.
For now, the pitch is simple enough. Startups prototyping electric aircraft or hyperloop pods—players who need to move fast and can tolerate some friction with a younger supplier—are the obvious fit. Established companies tired of waiting months for brackets and fairings might follow, assuming the quality holds and the prices make sense.
Eakin's bet is that composites manufacturing, like metalworking before it, can be turned into a digital workflow—standardized, predictable, fast. Whether that bet pays off depends on execution, and on whether the industry is ready to trust a Huntington Beach startup with parts that, in some cases, will be holding aircraft together at 30,000 feet.
Upload your part today. Get it next week. It's a hell of a pitch.
