An engineer in a defense startup needs a carbon fiber bracket. The old way: email a fabricator, wait for a callback, trade spreadsheets, get a quote a week later, and hope the lead time holds. The Layup Parts way: open a browser, drag in a 3D file, pick the layup, watch a price appear, and pay. The part shows up in about two weeks, with the cure logs to prove it. Same engineer. Same bracket. A wildly different afternoon.
01 / WHO THEY ARE NOWThe quote button for carbon fiber
Layup Parts is a Huntington Beach company that builds custom composite parts - and, more to the point, the software that makes ordering them feel ordinary. Its platform, FiberPortal, takes a 3D model, lets you configure materials and ply layups, returns an interactive quote with lead times you can actually pick, and then ships the finished carbon fiber or fiberglass part with quality paperwork attached. The industry shorthand that stuck is “the Amazon of composites.”
In June 2026 the company raised a $42 million Series A led by Marlinspike, with Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners joining returning backers Founders Fund and Lux Capital. Aerospace and defense are now its largest customer segment - which is a polite way of saying the slowest, most paperwork-heavy buyers in manufacturing decided this was faster.
“High quality parts, no order minimums, on time, every time.”
02 / THE PROBLEM THEY SAWComposites still run on phone tag
Composite parts are everywhere a few grams matter: aircraft structures, race cars, drones, satellites, even premium pickleball paddles. The material is modern. The way you buy it is not. Getting a custom part has long meant a chain of emails, hand-built quotes, and lead times that arrive as a mystery and leave as a surprise. Every part is bespoke, so every quote starts from zero.
That friction is the tax engineers pay for working in carbon fiber. It slows prototyping, hides cost until late, and makes small runs barely worth a fabricator's time. Layup Parts looked at that and decided the bottleneck wasn't the autoclave - it was the inbox.
“We can build software that has an order of magnitude reduction in clicking needed for engineers to produce parts.”
03 / THE FOUNDER'S BETA resume built out of carbon
Zack Eakin has spent roughly two decades around composite materials, in places that don't tolerate slow. He started at Chip Ganassi Racing, laying up carbon fiber structures for IndyCar and the DeltaWing prototype. He was an early engineer at The Boring Company, then moved to Anduril under Palmer Luckey. Each stop had the same lesson: the hardware is impressive, the process to order it is medieval.
The bet he made in 2024 is narrow and stubborn. Not a new fiber, not a new autoclave - a new front door. If you can turn the quoting, tooling, and ordering of a composite part into software, the rest of the supply chain has to speed up to match. Founders Fund led the seed round that year. It was a wager that the boring part of manufacturing was the part worth fixing.
The short, fast history
04 / THE PRODUCTFiberPortal, in four clicks
The platform is deliberately unglamorous. Upload a 3D file. Configure the material and the ply layup - aerospace-grade fibers like IM7 and T700S carbon sit right in the picker, next to S2-glass, Rohacell foam, and Nomex honeycomb. Receive an interactive quote where you choose the lead time instead of begging for one. Then receive the part, post-cured up to 355°F, with cure logs, out-life tracking, and inspection documents in the box.
Behind the four steps is real shop-floor capability: autoclave and out-of-autoclave curing, precision CNC machining, large-format 3D printing for tooling, and the certifications that let aerospace buyers say yes - AS9100D, ISO 9001:2015, ITAR compliant, DDTC registered. The software is the storefront. The certifications are why anyone trusts the storefront.
FiberPortal
Upload, configure layup, get an instant interactive quote with selectable lead times, then track the order to delivery.
Custom parts
Carbon fiber and fiberglass parts, prototyping through production, no order minimums.
Composite tooling
Molds and tooling backed by large-format 3D printing and precision CNC machining.
Quality docs
Cure logs, out-life tracking, and inspection records delivered with every part.
“Weeks of back-and-forth, compressed into an afternoon. The autoclave was never the slow part.”
05 / THE PROOFWho's buying, and what the numbers say
The customer list reads like a tour of places that care about strength-to-weight: aerospace and defense startups, traditional defense contractors, motorsports teams, automotive design and show-car studios, and consumer high-tech makers - including, yes, pickleball paddles. The same portal quotes a satellite bracket and a paddle face. That range is the argument: if the software can handle both, the bottleneck really was the process.
Funding, stacked
Investors followed the same logic twice. Founders Fund and Lux Capital backed the seed and re-upped. Marlinspike, a defense-focused fund, led the Series A - a signal about which customers Layup Parts expects to grow fastest.
“The same portal quotes a satellite bracket and a pickleball paddle. The software doesn't care which.”
06 / THE MISSIONMake ordering boring
The mission is almost anticlimactic: make ordering a custom composite part as accessible as buying anything else online. No order minimums. Quality you can document. Lead times you can plan around. In an industry that treats every part as a negotiation, the radical move is to make it a transaction.
That's also the discipline. A storefront only works if the part behind it is right every time, which is why the certifications and the cure logs aren't marketing - they're the product. Layup Parts is betting that trust at scale comes from paperwork done automatically, not promises made by email.
07 / WHY IT MATTERS TOMORROWLightweight everything
Demand for composites is climbing across aerospace, defense, EVs, and industrial hardware - all the places where shaving weight pays off. The supply of fast, documented, small-run composite manufacturing has not kept up. If Layup Parts is right, the company that wins isn't the one with the best autoclave. It's the one that turned ordering into software and let the rest of the shop floor catch up.
So return to that engineer with the carbon fiber bracket. A year ago, the bracket was a week of emails and a quote that arrived like weather. Now it's a file, a few clicks, a price, and a date. The part didn't change. The afternoon did. That swap - mystery for a quote button - is the entire company.