carbon-fiber
(4)Chris Holmes
Chris Holmes is the President and CEO of AvCarb Material Solutions, a Lowell, Massachusetts maker of engineered carbon materials - the felts, fabrics, and papers that quietly sit at the heart of hydrogen fuel cells, electrolyzers, and flow batteries. An MIT-trained systems engineer with a hybrid technical-and-business background, he is a turnaround specialist who has led high-technology businesses from start-up scale to north of $200M in revenue, largely inside private-equity portfolios. At AvCarb he is steering a company with 1960s roots toward the center of the clean-energy transition.
Noah Helman
Noah Helman is the co-founder and CEO of Industrial Microbes (iMicrobes), an Alameda, California synthetic biology company that engineers the central metabolism of microbes so they can eat cheap, renewable feedstocks - ethanol and methane - and spit out the chemicals normally pumped from petroleum. A Stanford applied-physics PhD who spent roughly a decade in physics labs before crossing into biology, Helman co-founded the company in 2014 with two fellow alumni of the biofuels startup LS9. iMicrobes targets drop-in, cost-competitive, net-zero versions of acrylic acid (for paints and adhesives) and acrylonitrile (for carbon fiber). The company went through Y Combinator's W15 batch, holds more than 20 patents, raised a $10M+ seed round in late 2024, and in 2025 announced it had scaled production of 100% bio-based, high-purity acrylic acid.
Zack Eakin
Zack Eakin is the co-founder and CEO of Layup Parts, a Huntington Beach startup that wants to make ordering custom carbon-fiber and fiberglass parts as easy as ordering from Amazon. A composites engineer who started in IndyCar bodywork at Chip Ganassi Racing, became the first engineer at Elon Musk's The Boring Company, and led mechanical engineering on Anduril's Roadrunner drone, Eakin launched Layup in 2024 to attack a problem he kept hitting himself: composite parts that take weeks and cost a fortune. With software-driven manufacturing and standardized stock materials, Layup compresses some jobs from weeks to hours. In June 2026 the company raised a $42 million Series A led by Marlinspike, on top of a $9 million seed from Founders Fund.
Riley Reese
Riley Reese is the CEO and co-founder of ARRIS Composites, a Berkeley-based advanced manufacturing company that invented Additive Molding - a patented process combining 3D printing and compression molding to produce continuous carbon-fiber composite parts at commercial scale. A materials scientist who once built biodegradable heart tissue scaffolds at UC Berkeley, Reese pivoted that same obsession with fiber architecture into a $157M-funded company whose technology now shows up in Brooks running shoes, Skydio drones, and bicycle spokes. He previously co-founded AREVO, worked at medical device giant Stryker, and led additive manufacturing programs in Amsterdam at TNO - before returning to Berkeley to tackle what he calls 'a new manufacturing category.'