composites
(7)
Plataine Wants the Factory to Make the Next Call - Before the Expensive Roll Expires
A roll of carbon fiber can expire, a tool can vanish and one late machine can scramble the week. Plataine built an industrial decision layer for exactly that mess - and its best evidence is measured in saved material, recovered hours and fewer wrong cuts.
Haley Keith Put a Business Brain Inside the Materials Lab
She met graphene in an MBA classroom, built a company with her husband, and spent a decade translating microscopic chemistry into products manufacturers could actually use. Now MITO's sale to First Graphene gives that patient work a global runway.
MITO Spent a Decade Making Graphene Boring Enough for the Factory Floor
Graphene had extraordinary lab results and an ordinary factory problem: it clumped, wandered and asked manufacturers to change too much. MITO built its business around the unglamorous fix - make the wonder material behave like an additive people can actually use.
The Chemicals Behind Flight Are Usually Invisible. GracoRoberts Built a Business Around Them.
A tube of sealant can hold up an aircraft repair just as surely as an engine part. GracoRoberts has spent decades turning those small, specification-heavy materials into a global distribution, technical service and ecommerce business.
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.
ARRIS Composites
ARRIS Composites is a Berkeley-based advanced manufacturing company that invented Additive Molding, a patented process for mass-producing continuous-fiber thermoplastic composite parts. The technology lets brands replace metal and plastic with lighter, stronger, more sustainable parts - and do it at consumer-electronics volumes.
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.'