Before Riley Reese ever touched a carbon fiber tow, he was trying to build scaffolds for growing heart tissue inside the human body. It was grad school at UC Berkeley, around 2014, and he was working at the intersection of 3D printing and biodegradable materials - printing structures that could hold living cells. Most researchers would have stayed in biomedical research. Reese took a different lesson from the experience: the real power wasn't in any one application. It was in the underlying idea that you could use existing materials in new fiber architectures to unlock properties that weren't there before.
That insight has been running the show ever since. From Berkeley, Reese moved to Stryker, doing failure analysis and product design on medical devices. Then he co-founded AREVO - one of the first companies to 3D print structural parts using continuous fiber composites, not just chopped fiber filler. Then Amsterdam: a stint at TNO, the Dutch research commercialization organization, where he led innovation program management for additive manufacturing. By 2017, he was back in Berkeley, co-founding ARRIS Composites with Ethan Escowitz and Erick Davidson.
The New Manufacturing Category
What ARRIS built isn't 3D printing. It isn't injection molding. Reese and his team call it Additive Molding - a patented process that lays continuous fiber in 3D-aligned orientations and then compresses it under heat, locking in geometries and fiber paths that neither traditional molding nor additive manufacturing can achieve on their own. The parts that come out are continuous-fiber thermoplastic composites, lighter and stronger than metal, moldable at commercial scale.
The technology found its first real proof point in aerospace. ARRIS worked with Northrop Grumman to convert a titanium aerospace bracket into a carbon fiber part with comparable strength - and 80% less weight. A paper came out of it, presented at CAMX 2020. Then came Skydio: the X2 drone's airframe went from 17 separate parts to a single ARRIS composite component, cutting weight 25% and winning a CES Innovation Award in the process. Suddenly the question wasn't whether Additive Molding worked. It was where else it could go.
"We've all heard of Injection Molding and Additive Manufacturing, but what about Additive Molding?"- Riley Reese, Manufacturing Executive Podcast, 2023
Running the Field He Races In
Reese is an avid marathon runner - not as a hobby he mentions in passing but as a practice that informs how he thinks. Running, he says, clears his head. Gives him headspace. It's also given ARRIS a natural proving ground: the company partnered with Brooks Running to develop carbon fiber plates for performance shoes. The technology became the basis of the Brooks Hyperion Elite line - the first running shoes to use continuous carbon-fiber-reinforced thermoplastic plates. Not chopped fiber, not injection-molded carbon-filled polymer. Actual continuous fiber, 3D-aligned.
At the Boston Marathon, ARRIS-Brooks partnership shoes were tested by elite runners on the same course where the technology was developed and honed. Reese, who trains on California trails and has logged enough marathons to know the difference a plate makes, has the rare distinction of being both the manufacturer and the end user.
The Intellectual Framework
There's a philosophy underneath all of this that Reese has articulated clearly in interviews: be mindful about reinventing things that other industries have already solved. Manufacturing is interconnected. It's dozens of steps that all have to align. And the biggest insight often isn't a new material - it's recognizing that a solution in aerospace can become a solution in footwear, that a process developed for defense drone airframes can end up in bicycle spokes or firearm components.
ARRIS's MTO (Made To Outperform) carbon fiber bicycle spokes launched in January 2024 as a direct consumer product - 2.7 times stronger gram-for-gram than the best-in-class aero spoke on the market. In late 2024, the company launched AURORRA by ARRIS, its first direct-to-consumer brand, selling carbon fiber insoles at SCHEELS retail locations. A strategic technology partnership with Henry Repeating Arms followed in early 2025, targeting lightweight composite components for firearms.
Scaling the Vision
In June 2022, ARRIS's Board of Directors elevated Reese from CTO to CEO. He'd co-founded the company in 2017, led R&D, materials science, and software for five years - and now runs the commercial operation as well. Under his leadership as CTO, ARRIS had already closed an $88.5M Series C in November 2021, bringing total funding past $157M. Investors include XN, NEA, Bosch, Valo Ventures, Taiwania Capital, and strategic industrial partners Standard Industries and Chuo Malleable Iron.
The Taiwan facility - 45,000+ square feet, production-grade - broke ground in 2020 and became the site of ARRIS's first large-scale consumer electronics production runs. "Our materials, design, and molding innovations have achieved a new level of scale with portable electronics products now shipping out of Taiwan," Reese said at the time. The company's manufacturing capacity has since expanded to over a million parts through a contract manufacturer agreement. Fast Company named ARRIS one of the 10 Most Innovative Manufacturers. The BIG Innovation Award has arrived four years in a row.
What Reese has built isn't just a company. It's a bet that the materials science bottleneck holding carbon fiber back from mass markets - the inability to manufacture complex continuous-fiber parts quickly and cheaply - was solvable with the right process architecture. The bet appears to be paying off, in running shoes, drones, bicycle spokes, and whatever comes next.