Boring Company Alum Score $9M for Advanced Composites Manufacturing

Layup Parts, a Huntington Beach, CA-based startup specializing in on-demand manufacturing of parts made from composites, has received $9 million in its latest financing round. Founders Fund, the VC firm founded by three PayPal alumni including Peter Thiel, led the round.

With a 10.4 percent stake in SpaceX, it is fitting that Founders Fund saw Layup Parts as an attractive investment, as the latter was founded by three individuals who met while working at another Elon Musk venture, The Boring Company. Layup Parts aims to establish a foothold in the service bureau space by catering specifically to customers who need composite parts more quickly than the market is currently capable of delivering.

In a TechCrunch article about Layup Parts’ $9 million financing round, Layup’s CEO and co-founder, Zack Eakin, said, “I think we can be 10 times faster, and on the tooling and upfront costs, we can be half the cost of what you would typically pay today. I believe that the long-term, high value contracts of tomorrow are in development today. If you work with people in development, and you understand their needs, and you can deliver quality parts for them, you will provide a better service and put yourself in a better position to get those contracts by focusing on the thing that may make less sense in a boardroom, which is focusing on development and speed.”

This is at least the second startup founded by former Musk employees in the last several weeks, with Diagon, developer of a sourcing platform for advanced manufacturing equipment — co-founded by a former manager of Tesla’s supply chains — pulling in $5 million in April. Bearing out another key, current advanced manufacturing theme in the VC arena, Layup is also the second composites service bureau to receive funding in the last few weeks, following ARRIS’s $34 million round participated in by Bosch Ventures.

As I pointed out in my post about ARRIS’s strong round, the US’s continued push to catch up to China in the global battle over the EV market should put a long-term premium on companies that can reliably deliver parts made from composites to the US industrial base. Along these lines, it is worth pointing out that the more entrenched that the EV industry becomes in the manufacturing sector at-large, the more likely it is that manufacturing for every other industry will look more and more like manufacturing for EVs.

Although the EV market is notoriously volatile, the Biden administration recently signaled it will make significant efforts to reverse that trend, by announcing a quadrupling of tariffs on Chinese-made EVs. As this development takes hold and evolves, we should see all the more demand for composite companies like Layup Parts, not to mention persistently increasing interest in companies founded by former employees of companies founded by Elon Musk.

Images courtesy of Layup Parts