Redwood Materials finally found a new CFO about a year and a half later his last left. He’s a familiar face to former Tesla executives who run the battery recycling and energy storage company.
On Monday, Redwood Materials said it hired former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja as its new chief financial officer. Ahuja joins an executive team that includes former Tesla CTO (Redwood Founder and CEO JB Straubel) and former Tesla VP of Powertrains Colin Campbell (Redwood CTO), among other Tesla expats across the ranks. Most recently, Ahuja was chief financial and commercial officer at drone company Zipline.
But despite Ahuja’s many years managing Tesla’s finances and a hot IPO market for anything remotely related to AI data centers, he tells TechCrunch that it’s “too early” to talk about going public.
“Naturally, an IPO is a potential outcome for any private company, and we will talk about it when the time is right,” he said. Part of his caution, he said, is because Redwood Materials has so far had no trouble raising money from blue-chip investors. In January, the company closed a $425 million Series E funding round that brought its total capital raised to more than $2 billion and its valuation to more than $6 billion. It also added the venture arm of Google and Nvidia to its cap table.
“I would say Redwood already has the crème de la crème of investors, who have a lot of money,” Ahuja said. “If they’re excited, they’ll fund. But I also hope that new investors see what Redwood is doing, and they’ll be equally excited and want to come and invest and offer us, maybe, good terms as well.”
Ahuja’s appointment comes at a crucial time for Redwood Materials. The company recently lost its COO (another former Tesla executive) to retirement, along with at least three other vice presidentsThose executives left amid a restructuring that affected 10% of their workforce (or about 135 employees), as TechCrunch first reported last month, as the company shifts resources to its fast-growing energy storage business.
Ahuja told TechCrunch that he is “excited about the very innovative technology solutions that impact our climate.” [and] that address our energy needs,” and who has remained close to Straubel since the two left Tesla in 2019. In fact, Ahuja told TechCrunch that he is a “small investor” in Redwood Materials.
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“In many ways, it seemed like a natural fit, in terms of the energy storage business, the recycling business – these are all such critical needs for our country and our society that it seemed like the right place to be,” he said.
There is undeniable buzz around AI: SpaceX is about to go public, OpenAI and Anthropic are rumored to be considering IPOs, and billions of dollars are being raised to build data centers. Redwood’s energy storage business initially aims to help AI data centers manage their energy loads, although Ahuja said he’s not worried about getting carried away with the exuberance.
“I think JB and I have seen so many cycles of hype and disappointment in our lives that we’re going to be very conscious of how we message, how we manage and how we grow the company,” he said. “We’re dealing with hardware that, by definition, brings a certain degree of sanity” compared to what’s happening in software-focused AI companies, he added.
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