Redwood Materials finally found a new CFO after about a year and a half his last one is gone. He is a familiar face to the former Tesla executives who run the battery recycling and energy storage company.
On Monday, Redwood Materials announced that it has hired former Tesla chief financial officer Deepak Ahuja as its new CFO. Ahuja joins an executive team that includes former Tesla CTO (JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood) and former Tesla VP of Powertrain Colin Campbell (Redwood CTO), among many other Tesla expats across the board. Most recently, Ahuja was head of finance and operations at drone company Zipline.
But despite Ahuja’s many years running Tesla’s finances and a hot IPO market for anything remotely related to AI data centers, he tells TechCrunch it’s “too early” to talk about going public.
“Of course, an IPO is a possible outcome for any private company and we will discuss that when the time is right,” he said. Part of his focus, he said, was because Redwood Materials has so far had no trouble raising money from blue-chip investors. The company in January closed a $425 million Series E funding round that brought its total capital to more than $2 billion and its valuation to more than $6 billion. It also added the business arm of Google and Nvidia to its capital board.
“Redwood has, I would say, the cream of the crop of investors already, who have deep pockets,” Ahuja said. “If they’re excited, they’ll fund. But I also expect that new investors will see what Redwood is doing and they’ll be just as excited and want to come in and invest and offer us, maybe, good terms as well.”
Ahuja’s appointment comes at a pivotal time for Redwood Materials. The company recently lost its CEO (another former Tesla executive) to retirement, along with at least three other vice presidents. Those executives left amid a restructuring that affected 10 percent of its workforce (or about 135 employees), as TechCrunch first reported last month, as the company shifts resources toward its fast-growing energy storage business.
Ahuja told TechCrunch that he is “excited by very innovative technological solutions that affect our climate [and] that meet our energy needs,” and has remained close with Straubel since the pair left Tesla in 2019. In fact, Ahuja told TechCrunch that he is a “small investor” in Redwood Materials.
“In so many ways, it felt 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 just felt like the right place,” he said.
There’s an undeniable hype surrounding artificial intelligence, with SpaceX going public, OpenAI and Anthropic rumored to be considering IPOs, and billions of dollars being raised to build data centers. Redwood’s energy storage business is initially aimed at helping AI data centers manage their power loads, though Ahuja said he’s not worried about getting carried away by 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 careful and conscious about how we message, how we manage and how we grow the company,” he said. “We’re dealing with hardware here, which by definition brings a certain degree of logic” compared to what happens in software-focused AI companies, he added.
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