A factory that runs on customer data
Eakin's pitch for the future of his company is gloriously unglamorous: a system that, in his words, "just takes customer data and poops out shapes." Behind the joke is a real bet. If Layup Parts stocks a standard library of carbon-fiber and fiberglass materials, then most of the engineering judgment that normally slows a composite job down can be moved into software. Order online, skip the back-and-forth, and the part shows up. He calls it the Amazon of composites, and he means the boring parts of Amazon too - the catalog, the inventory, the one-click checkout.
That framing only lands because Eakin has done the slow version for most of his career. He started at Chip Ganassi Racing, shaping carbon-fiber structures and bodywork for IndyCar programs and the DeltaWing, the wedge-shaped prototype that looked like nothing else on a grid. Race teams live and die by composites - light, stiff, expensive, and painfully manual to produce. He learned the craft where mistakes get measured in lap times.
In 2017 he became the first engineer at Elon Musk's The Boring Company, a job that is mostly an exercise in first-principles thinking: why does a tunnel cost what it costs, and which of those costs are laws of physics versus laws of habit. He carried that question back into composites when he joined Anduril in 2021, rose to Director of Mechanical Engineering, and led the design of Roadrunner, a reusable autonomous air vehicle. Building drones means buying a lot of composite parts. Buying a lot of composite parts means waiting.
Born out of a need
Layup Parts, Eakin says, was "born out of a need that we had at Anduril." He kept hitting the same wall - parts that took weeks and cost more than the physics demanded - and eventually decided the wall was the business. In 2024 he left to start Layup with two co-founders pulled from the same orbit: Hanno Kappen, who had worked at The Boring Company and the robotic pizzeria Stellar Pizza, and Elisa Suarez, a veteran of The Boring Company, Rivian, and the solar company Heliogen. Three operators who had all watched hardware get built the hard way.
The early results are the kind founders like to quote: 10x faster delivery at roughly half the tooling cost, with some jobs compressed from weeks to hours. The customer list is the giveaway about what kind of company this is. Defense and aerospace, yes - the world Eakin came from. But also motorsports teams, design studios building one-off show cars, and pickleball paddle makers. The same software-driven line serves a drone program and a paddle brand, because once the materials are standardized, the machine does not care what shape it is pooping out.
Why this and why now
Ask Eakin what actually excites him and the answer is not the defense contracts. It is the student in a garage. "The idea of being able to provide that to young students so that they can realize the things that they want to build - that's the thing that actually makes me excited." Composites have always been gatekept by cost and lead time. If you can order a custom carbon part the way you order a book, the gate opens for people who never had a race-team budget.
There is a useful tension in how he talks about the software. The goal is not more features. It is fewer clicks. "If we have stock materials, we can build software that has an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of clicking," he says - the engineer's dream of a tool that quietly disappears between intent and output. Most manufacturing software adds steps. Eakin is trying to subtract them until the interface is barely there. Zero-click is the slogan; the work is everything required to earn it.
The money has followed the thesis. A $9 million seed in 2024, led by Founders Fund with Lux Capital and Haystack, got the Huntington Beach factory running. Then, in June 2026, a $42 million Series A led by Marlinspike, with Cerberus Ventures and Pinegrove Venture Partners joining returning backers Founders Fund and Lux. The plan for the new capital is unromantic and telling: hire more people and move into a bigger building. This is a company that grows by making more parts, not by making more slides.
Before any of that, Eakin did something quietly characteristic. He took his pitch to the people who had built Anduril - Palmer Luckey coached him on storytelling, Brian Schimpf on strategy, Matt Grimm on how to talk to VCs. An engineer asking for help with the parts of the job that are not engineering. It is the same instinct that drives the whole company: figure out which problems are actually yours to solve, and offload the rest to a system - or a mentor - that does it better.
The catalog is the moat
The thing to understand about composites is that almost none of the slowness is the curing. It is the deciding. Which weave, which resin, how many plies, in what orientation, with what tooling - every one of those choices is a small negotiation between an engineer and a shop, and every negotiation costs days. Eakin's insight is that most of those choices do not actually need to be bespoke. Stock the materials, fix the configurations, and the negotiation collapses into a selection. That is why he keeps talking about clicks instead of physics. The hard, defensible work is not a faster autoclave. It is a catalog disciplined enough that software can stand on top of it.
It is worth noticing what he chose not to build. He did not start a defense prime, even though he came from one and the contracts were within reach. He did not start a materials-science lab chasing an exotic new fiber. He started a parts company - the unglamorous middle of the supply chain, the layer everyone else treats as a cost center. The bet is that whoever owns the ordering experience owns the relationship, the same way Amazon never had to invent the book to own how books get bought. For a man who spent years on the receiving end of that supply chain, the choice reads less like ambition and more like revenge served at scale.
The customer spread is the proof the thesis is more than a deck. A defense program and a pickleball brand have nothing in common except that both need a stiff, light shape made of layered fiber, and both have historically had to find a shop, explain the part, and wait. When the same line can quote and produce for a one-off show car, a motorsports team, and an aerospace supplier without re-tooling its entire approach each time, the standardization is doing real work. Breadth, in this business, is not a distraction from focus. It is the whole point - the signal that the platform underneath has been generalized far enough to stop caring what it is making.
What comes next is the least surprising part of the story, which is exactly why it matters. Hire. Build a bigger factory. Make more parts, faster, for more people. There is no pivot lurking in the Series A, no sudden turn toward something flashier. Eakin has spent roughly two decades learning that composites reward patience and punish shortcuts, and he is building a company that compounds the same way - one standardized material, one removed click, one shipped part at a time. The slogan is zero-click. The work, as ever, is everything it takes to get there.