Ex-Anduril engineer lands $42M to build an Amazon for composite parts

Before Zack Eakin pitched his startup to investors, he practiced on Palmer Luckey. When Eakin left Luckey’s defense firm Anduril in 2024 to launch Layup Parts, a composites company, Luckey and Anduril co-founders Brian Schimpf and Matt Grimm let him refine his pitch with them. Each offered distinct advice: Grimm focused on VC pitching, Schimpf pushed strategy, and Luckey emphasized storytelling. That mini boot camp clearly paid off.

Two years after raising a $9 million seed round, the Huntington Beach, California-based startup announced Tuesday that it has secured $42 million in Series A funding. The round was led by dual-use venture firm Marlinspike, with new participants Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners joining existing backers Founders Fund and Lux Capital. That’s a substantial sum for a company of roughly 60 employees.

Most of the seed capital went toward equipment. Now, Eakin plans to use the fresh funding to expand the team and move into a larger facility this year. The ultimate goal: make ordering custom carbon fiber or fiberglass parts as seamless as buying something on Amazon.

Eakin has spent about two decades working with composite materials, starting in motorsports at Chip Ganassi Racing, where he handled carbon-fiber structures for IndyCar entries and the controversial DeltaWing prototype. He took a detour to become the first engineer at Elon Musk’s Boring Company in 2017, but by 2021 he was back in composites at Anduril.

During his tunneling stint, Eakin noticed a transformation in industrial fabrication. Startups like SendCutSend and Protolabs had slashed the time and cost to prototype and ship parts. Yet no one had done the same for composites. “It just kind of dawned on me that all these other manufacturing verticals are getting better, and we are struggling to find people to make our composite parts for us,” he said. “Why is there nobody trying to make this better?”

He understood the obstacles. Composites require more hands-on handling, and consolidation among composite firms made larger companies reluctant to innovate and risk steady revenue. Even if they wanted to, most lacked the software talent to build tools for a one-click or zero-click solution.

“If we have stock materials, and you have a good understanding of those materials, we can build software that has an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of clicking it takes for an engineer to produce those , and ultimately gets to zero clicks, where it just takes customer data and poops out shapes,” Eakin said with a smile.

Starting a new composites company seemed the best path, he added, noting that these challenges made the idea more valuable. “I just decided this might be the best thing I can do for Anduril, is to go fix this part of the supply chain, because I don’t think it’s just an Anduril problem.”

Since founding Layup Parts two years ago, Eakin’s team has rapidly prototyped and produced parts for motorsports, design studios making show cars, and even pickleball paddle companies. In some cases, the time from receiving customer data to manufacturing a part has dropped from weeks to hours.

Unsurprisingly, aerospace and defense represent the largest business lines, serving both startups and traditional defense primes. The investor lineup reflects that opportunity: Marlinspike is already invested in Anduril and other defense-focused manufacturers. Cerberus Ventures was founded in 2023 by Chris Darby, who ran the CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel for nearly 20 years.

Eakin also carries lessons from The Boring Company into his startup. Though he didn’t work with composites there, he said the experience involved first-principles engineering similar to racing. “Elon has a very high sense of urgency, so as much as it was a new type of thing to make, it felt familiar with the crazy deadlines and just developing stuff as fast as you can,” he said.