Barely five months after its founding, hard technology startup Layout parts has secured a $9 million funding round led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack also participated.
The breakneck pace is more than a subtle indication that investor appetite for technology-focused solutions to the problems of the American industrial base is not waning. But Layup was likely able to close a large funding round so quickly, at least in part, because the founders themselves have deep experience with the issues plaguing domestic manufacturing.
Layup was founded by Zack Eakin, Hanno Kappen and Elisa Suarez; The trio met while working on The Boring Company, Elon Musk's idiosyncratic effort to transform transportation through tunnels. Kappen went on to work at robotic pizzeria Stellar Pizza, while Suárez worked at Rivian and renewable energy company Heliogen.
Eakin, CEO of Layup, moved to Anduril in 2021 as director of mechanical engineering. He led the mechanical design of the company's suite of flying drone products, including the Roadrunner, which was simply “Palmer (Luckey)'s idea when I started,” he said in a recent interview.
Eakin would still be with Anduril, he says, if it weren't for the idea of founding Layup. “He was born from a need that we had in Anduril, a need that the world has and that became poignant during my stay there,” he said.
Most areas of manufacturing have changed throughout Eakin's career, except composites, he said. Companies like Protolabs, Xometry and Fictiv have innovated in processes such as CNC machining, sheet metal cutting and injection molding. These companies (and many others) have developed a seamless, almost amazon-like experience for manufacturing hardware quickly, and that has left a permanent mark on the industry.
But there has been no equivalent innovation in the manufacturing of composite parts. There are a few reasons for this, Eakin said. The first is that existing composites manufacturers are not well leveraged to develop the software tools necessary to do it well; The other is that composites are more artisanal and less easily automatable in certain steps of the process. Therefore, bringing the number of humans in the manufacturing loop closer to zero is inherently more complicated.
Roadrunner is a good example: it has a lot of composite components, but getting them is time-consuming and expensive. It's common for an engineer to have to wait up to two weeks to receive a quote from a manufacturer (as opposed to the 10 minutes it takes for a service like Protolabs); After cutting a purchase order from the supplier, the wait extends perhaps to a week or two for a small, simple part, and up to four or five months for something more complicated or large.
Instead, Layup aims to return small parts within three days, and for larger components, the company aims for two weeks, all at a lower cost to the customer. “I think we can be 10 times faster and, in terms of initial and tooling costs, we can cost half of what you would normally pay today,” Eakin estimated.
Overall, Eakin didn't seem too worried about the competition; Many of the major composites companies are owned by private equity firms, and those companies tend to focus on landing larger, long-term contracts rather than quicker-turnaround development programs, he said.
“I believe the long-term, high-value contracts of tomorrow are in development today,” he said. “If you work with people in development, understand their needs, and can deliver quality parts to them, you will provide better service and put yourself in a better position to win those contracts by focusing on what may generate less revenue. It makes sense in a boardroom, which is focused on development and speed.”
Most of the work ahead of the company, and where it will be able to differentiate itself most strongly, is in the software domain, although it will probably be a few years before Layup can accept any CAD model from clients and deliver a part in a matter of days. But that doesn't mean the company isn't moving quickly: With the new funding, Layup aims to have an online factory making parts for customers by the end of the third quarter of this year.
That means the $9 million will go primarily toward capital expenditures such as a larger building and more equipment, as well as hiring on both the software side and factory technicians.
There has been much, often frenetic, talk from Silicon Valley about the many problems facing the American industrial base, including an aging workforce and an over-reliance on tribal knowledge. But Eakin said what really motivates him is thinking about all the engineering students who are eager to build but face high barriers to entry due to outdated processes. Layup seeks to change that.
“The idea of being able to offer that to young students so they can do the things they want to build is what really excites me about what we're doing. That's what I think has happened to all these other areas of manufacturing and composites have been left behind. Whether or not we're fixing a supply chain, aging demographics, that's great. We will do that too. Brilliant. What excites me is the ability to bring good composed pieces and make them available to all people.”
