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Best Place To BuildThis startup is putting India on the global map of advanced manufacturing | Fabheads | BP2B S2 Ep.9
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Fabheads automates composite additive manufacturing to scale India’s high-performance parts
- Fabheads focuses on composite materials like carbon fiber, Kevlar, and glass fiber, which offer high strength-to-weight and safety benefits but are still largely manufactured by hand layup today.
- Dhinesh argues composites have effectively been “additively manufactured” for decades (layer-by-layer layup and filament winding), and the real leap now is automating that additive process.
- The company built both a new material-processing approach and a proprietary machine/process, taking ~4 years to reach an MVP and proving viability despite investor skepticism about long hardware timelines.
- Fabheads operates mainly as Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS), producing parts (currently up to ~1.5 m) for drones, ISRO-related components, and robotics, while selectively placing machines in academia for adoption and talent-building.
- A core strategic thesis is national capability: India cannot reliably scale aerospace/defense/drone composite production without owning the automation technology and reducing dependence on scarce skilled technicians and restricted imports.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasComposites’ bottleneck isn’t material performance—it’s manufacturing scalability.
Carbon fiber and glass fiber deliver exceptional strength-to-weight and safety, but the dominant process (hand layup) is slow, labor-heavy, and hard to scale for large programs like drones, rockets, and aircraft.
For composites, “additive manufacturing” is fundamentally automation of a legacy additive process.
Dhinesh’s framing is that composites have always been built layer-by-layer; what Fabheads is doing is making that additive process robotic, repeatable, and faster than manual alternatives.
Directionality (anisotropy) is the reason composite manufacturing can’t simply copy metal/plastic methods.
Because fiber orientation determines strength, processes like casting or typical machining don’t translate; manufacturing must place fibers deliberately, which is why automation of placement is high-impact.
Deep-tech hardware often requires solving the materials stack before the machine stack.
Fabheads first had to convert off-the-shelf composite inputs into a usable form for their process; material processing alone took ~2.5 years, before machine prototyping could be meaningfully validated.
Investor fit matters: technical believers fund long timelines better than hype-driven capital.
Early funding came from engineer/industrialist angels who could understand why a 4-year MVP is normal in hardware, unlike typical software expectations.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotes“At Fabheads, we primarily focus on… composite materials… they just feel like plastics, but they're as strong as stainless steel.”
— Dhinesh Kanagaraj
“Every single wind turbine blade… [is] hand laid… 50, 60 people will be sitting on top of one big mold…”
— Dhinesh Kanagaraj
“Along with us, there are only about seven companies across the world who do this… we are the only ones doing it in India for the first time.”
— Dhinesh Kanagaraj
“Persevere and be flexible about it, not just be stubborn. You cannot keep doing the same thing and expect some things will change.”
— Dhinesh Kanagaraj
“It was almost like two startups together.”
— Dhinesh Kanagaraj
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
