Helicon brings automation to high-volume composite manufacturing

Advanced composites offer strength and stiffness at low weight, but their large-scale production 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 emerged stealthily with $16 million in seed funding, led by AlleyCorp. Helicon aims to reduce composite production times from six months or more to two weeks.

The co-founder moved from autonomous systems to automated manufacturing

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

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

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

“It was a great, eye-opening experience towards autonomy and working in a fast-paced team,” Sanz-Gadea said. “We were lucky to have sponsors like Google, Uber and Volkswagen.”

He then worked at a startup in the Netherlands on autonomous drones for infrastructure inspections, followed by a year at ETH Zurich. Sanz-Gadea developed a diffusion policy to allow an ANYbotics quadruped to perform robot-to-human transitions before founding Helicon.

Sanz-Gadea founded Helicon with co-founder and CEO Alex Niehaus around a shared vision of building a new generation of highly automated manufacturing for composites.

Autonomous factories face a defense challenge

Why did Helicon choose to start with carbon fiber production?

“The production of composites is still a very manual process, difficult to automate, especially the handling of flexible materials such as carbon fiber fabrics,” explained Sanz-Gadea. “Added to this is the heavy regulation surrounding manned aviation and defense programs.”

“Traditionally, you start with a mold for the part you want to make and put the carbon fiber material in it,” he added. “Depending on the process, the material may already contain the resin, as in prepreg, or the resin may be introduced later through processes such as vacuum infusion or resin transfer molding.”

This labor-intensive approach has worked for leading companies like Lockheed or Boeing, because production volumes are low and the cost of each part is high, Sanz-Gadea said. But a new generation of companies in drones, robotics and aerospace are looking to build much larger volumes without giving up the performance advantages of composites.

“The mindset is changing from building a small number of extremely optimized systems to building good systems on a much larger scale,” Sanz-Gadea said. “You see this very clearly with drones, but it’s also happening in robotics and other industries. The challenge is to figure out how to produce lightweight, high-performance structures in hundreds of thousands rather than hundreds.”

“Most companies still buy flat sheets of carbon fiber from abroad, cutting them into shape and assembling them with fasteners,” Sanz-Gadea said. “It’s a very inefficient way to build a facility, it creates a lot of assembly work, and it makes it much more difficult to produce competitively at scale in the United States”

Helicon prepares for mass production

Helicon is preparing for production by moving into a 3,344.5 m² space in Torrance, California. From the materials used to the equipment and processes in the factory, the company is building everything around automation and high-volume manufacturing, Sanz-Gadea noted.

“We focus on ease of automation and high-volume manufacturing methods,” he said. “The goal is to use processes that can be automated much more easily and that can be performed with much faster cycle times – less than 15 minutes, compared to hours for traditional layup and autoclave processes.”

“The materials and processes we use are also much easier to automate,” Sanz-Gadea said. “You can design the process so that a robot can reliably pick up the material, place it, remove the finished part, and then handle downstream steps such as trimming and quality control.”

“There is a lot of demand,” he said. “The challenge companies face is that they can typically make a certain number of prototypes in-house – small production runs of 10 to 100 units by hand – but when they win a contract for thousands, they can’t hire enough people.”

“For robotics we don’t need huge industrial arms,” Sanz-Gadea said. “The important part is to design the entire cell for repeatability and speed.”

The company is also working closely with numerous material suppliers to support production in much larger volumes. “There really isn’t a shortage of carbon fiber per se,” Sanz-Gadea said. “The bottleneck is the ability to turn that material into finished parts on a national scale.”

Sanz-Gadea sees the customer base for composites beyond the aerospace sector

Helicon is working to obtain the necessary certifications to serve demanding aerospace and defense programs, but also sees interest from robotics, logistics, maritime and other sectors where lightweight, high-performance structures matter.

“Most robotic systems today are made of aluminum, and our materials offer greater rigidity at 40% less weight,” he said. “This translates into longer battery life, smaller actuators, or greater payload capacity. We see a great opportunity as robotics moves towards large-scale manufacturing through humanoids and mobile robots.”

The stiffness-to-weight ratio of carbon fiber is significantly better than that of metals and plastics, but producing it on a large scale is still difficult.

“Composites today are a bit like metals before modern industrialization,” Sanz-Gadea said. “The material properties are exceptional, but the manufacturing infrastructure has failed to catch up. Steel only became transformative when companies like Carnegie and Bethlehem Steel figured out how to produce it reliably and at scale.”

“Carbon fiber has already proven itself in elite applications such as Formula 1, fighter aircraft and spacecraft,” he explained. “The challenge now is to bring the same performance benefits to products made in much larger volumes. That’s what we’re focused on.”

Helicon’s vision attracts large-scale funding

Sanz-Gadea and co-founder and CEO Alex Niehaus founded Helicon with the broader goal of “reindustrializing the West.” The company began in London, where it focused on developing technology, building relationships with suppliers and building relationships with potential customers.

They later spent time in San Francisco meeting with investors, customers and others in the advanced manufacturing ecosystem, before choosing Los Angeles as the base for Helicon’s manufacturing operations.

“A lot of the initial work was about building the right relationships within the company,” Sanz-Gadea said. “We spent time with customers, material suppliers, manufacturers and operators in aerospace, defense, robotics and advanced manufacturing to understand where the strongest needs were.”

Helicon initially raised capital from angel investors before bringing on board institutional investors. The oversubscribed round allowed the founders to be selective about which partners they bring to the cap table.

Sanz-Gadea said Brannon Jones, a lead on AlleyCorp’s deep-tech team, stood out because of his background in SpaceX and advanced manufacturing. “He immediately understood what we were trying to build,” Sanz-Gadea said. “The next day he flew from New York to San Francisco to meet us.”

Now, Helicon is building its manufacturing capabilities in Los Angeles and hiring people in mechanical and structural engineering, software, robotics, manufacturing and operations.

“The ambition is much bigger than just making one type of carbon fiber component,” Sanz-Gadea said. “We want to develop the manufacturing capacity to produce advanced composites on a real industrial scale.”