Deepak Ahuja
Source: Verily
Redwood Materials has started an electric vehicle battery recycling business. tesla Board member and former CTO JB Straubel will join fellow former Tesla executive Deepak Ahuja as CFO, the company announced Monday.
Ahuja served as Tesla’s finance director from March 2017 to March 2019, marking Elon Musk’s second term at the EV and clean energy company. He first joined Tesla in 2008, led the company through its IPO in 2010, briefly stepped down in 2015, and was rehired two years later.
Ahuja told CNBC that his relationship with Strobel largely influenced his decision to join the recycling startup.
“Having known JB for 18 years, I have great respect for him as a leader, engineer and thinker. And knowing much of the leadership team from Tesla makes it easy for me to step in with confidence and build the business,” he said. “There are different business models, different growth areas, capital allocation, and it will still be a learning experience for me.”
Strobel originally founded Redwood Materials in 2017 and ran it while concurrently serving as Tesla’s CTO until July 2019.
The Carson City, Nevada-based startup has raised more than $2.3 billion in venture funding from an array of venture firms and strategic backers, including: google, Nvidiaventures, microsoftamong them OMERS and Eclipse, which also secured $2 billion in financing commitments from the Department of Energy.
Redwood Materials is currently valued at more than $6 billion.
The incoming CFO also praised Redwood Materials’ efforts to ensure that critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel “remain at home.” Such minerals are essential for the production of consumer electronics, automobiles, defense products, and energy products.
“That’s very motivating to me, the scale of how much this is going to grow and the critical need for it in this country,” he said.
After leaving Tesla in 2019, Ahuja served as CFO of Verily Life Sciences and joined drone delivery company Zipline in 2022 as chief business and financial officer.
Ranked No. 46 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor List, Zipline is the world’s largest drone delivery company, with more than 2.3 million commercial drone deliveries to date. The company recently completed an $800 million funding round at a valuation of $7.8 billion. Zipline’s delivery drones are fully electric.
A Zipline spokesperson told CNBC that Mr. Ahuja will remain a close advisor to the company.
Redwood Materials considers batteries for EVs and other machinery and equipment to be some of the nation’s most valuable energy assets. That’s because batteries still have the ability to store energy when they reach the end of a vehicle or other device’s useful life, and used batteries typically contain important minerals that can be extracted and used in new products.
In its early days, Redwood Materials focused on “closed-loop” recycling, taking used electric vehicle batteries and scrap from auto factories and turning them into raw materials and components to make new battery cells.
Currently, the company is also building and deploying battery energy storage systems that can store power from intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and water for later use. The system, manufactured by Redwood Materials, includes a repurposed or “second life” EV battery.
The U.S. data center boom is creating huge demand for systems used in factories, defense operations and even to stabilize power grid operations.
“Without battery systems, the grid will simply fall behind and we won’t be able to have off-grid solutions for even large-scale industrial and commercial needs,” Ahuja told CNBC.
TechCrunch first reported that Ahuja joined Redwood Materials less than a month after the company went through a restructuring. The restructuring involved cutting about 10% of its headcount, or 135 people, in part to refocus resources on its energy division.
The company has been without a CFO for more than a year, since former finance leader Jason Thompson left Redwood Materials to join Nuclear Company in Reno in December 2024.
“Today’s Redwoods are the strongest they’ve ever been,” Straubel wrote in a widely distributed email on April 15 informing employees of the layoffs. “We see great momentum at Redwood Energy, with the materials business on track to profitability and an exciting roadmap ahead.”
Ahuja told CNBC that despite recent ups and downs, he sees demand for fully electric vehicles increasing in the United States.
In the energy storage business, Redwood Materials has agreements with the following partners: ford, Rivian It built a 12-megawatt, 63-megawatt-hour microgrid in Abilene, Texas, for AI infrastructure company Crusoe, calling it “the world’s largest secondary battery deployment.”
