Advanced composites offer strength and stiffness at low weight, but manufacturing them at scale remains slow, labor-intensive, and difficult to automate. Helicon Industries is building automated manufacturing systems designed to bring composites into high-volume production, starting with carbon fiber.

The Los Angeles-based startup has emerged from stealth with $16 million in seed funding, led by AlleyCorp. Helicon aims to cut composite manufacturing lead times from six months or more down to two weeks.

Edmundo Sanz-Gadea, co-founder and chief technology officer of Helicon, built rockets and drones in his youth in Madrid. That led to a high school internship at the European Space Agency in Paris, followed by studies in aerospace at TU Delft in the Netherlands.

“Traditional aerospace felt like squeezing out that last 1% of efficiency from already highly optimized systems. If you look at things like jet engine design or commercial aircraft aerodynamics, they’re already pretty close to optimal,” Sanz-Gadea told The Robot Report. “I got very interested in the new wave of robotics and autonomous systems. So I spent a year on a Formula Student self-driving team, where students design and build race cars and compete all around the world.”

“TU Delft and MIT combined forces,” he recalled. “We were doing most of the hardware in Delft and a lot of the autonomous algorithms at MIT. I was bridging the two sides. There were 10 of us working full time, managing a team of more than 100 part-time engineers.”

“It was a great experience, eye-opening toward autonomy and working in a fast-paced team,” said Sanz-Gadea.

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