Deepak Ahuja
Source: Sure
Redwood Materials, an electric vehicle battery recycling business started by Tesla Board member and former CTO JB Straubel is bringing in another former Tesla executive, Deepak Ahuja, as CFO, the company announced Monday.
Ahuja served as chief financial officer at Tesla from March 2017 to March 2019, his second stint at Elon Musk’s EV and clean energy company. He first joined Tesla in 2008, steered it through an IPO in 2010, resigned briefly in 2015 and was recruited back two years later.
Ahuja told CNBC that his relationship with Straubel influenced his decision to join the reboot.
“Having known JB for the past 18 years, I have great respect for him as a leader, engineer and thinker. And knowing many of the leadership team from Tesla makes it easy for me to step in with a sense of honesty and build the business,” he said. “There are different business models, different areas of growth and capital allocation, which is still going to be a learning experience for me.”
Straubel started Redwood Materials in 2017, running it while serving as Tesla 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, NvidiaNventures, MicrosoftOMERS and Eclipse, among them, also received a $2 billion loan obligation from the Department of Energy.
Redwood Materials is now valued at over $6 billion.
The incoming CFO also praised Redwood Materials for the work that ensures important minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and others, “stay within the country.” Such minerals are important in the production of consumer electronics, automobiles, defense and energy products.
“That’s really encouraging to me — the scale of how much this is going to grow, and the critical need for it in the country,” he said.
After his resignation from Tesla in 2019, Ahuja served as CFO of Verily Life Sciences, and in 2022 he joined Zipline, a drone delivery company, where he served as chief business and financial officer.
Zipline, ranked #46 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor list, is the world’s largest drone delivery company, and has made over 2.3 million commercial deliveries by drone to date. The company recently closed $800 million in funding at a valuation of $7.8 billion. Zipline delivery drones are fully electric.
A Zipline spokesperson told CNBC that Ahuja remains a close advisor to the company.
Redwood Materials views the batteries from EVs, and other machines and devices, as some of the country’s most important energy assets. That’s because batteries still have the ability to store energy when they reach the end of their useful life in cars and other appliances, and often, used batteries contain valuable minerals that can be extracted, and used in new products.
In its early years, Redwood Materials focused on “closed loop” recycling, taking obsolete electric vehicle batteries and waste from auto industries, and turning those into raw materials and components to make new battery cells.
Today, the company also develops and operates battery energy storage systems, which can store energy from intermittent, renewable energy sources – such as solar, wind and water – for future use. Systems made by Redwood Materials include “second life” recycled EV batteries.
The growth of the data center in the US is driving a huge demand for systems, which can be reused in industrial, defense and grid stabilization applications.
“If we don’t have battery systems, our grid lags behind, and we can’t have off-grid solutions for the large, industrial or commercial needs we may have,” Ahuja told CNBC.
Ahuja arrives at Redwood Materials less than a month after the company launched a restructuring, in which it cut about 10% of its workforce, or 135 people, in part to refocus resources on diversification, TechCrunch first reported.
The company had been without a CFO for more than a year after its former chief financial officer, Jason Thompson, left Redwood Materials to join Nuclear Company in Reno in December 2024.
“Redwood today is the strongest it’s ever been,” Straubel wrote in a widely circulated email informing employees of the cuts on April 15. “The materials business is on its way to profitability and has an exciting road map ahead and we see great momentum for Redwood Energy.”
Ahuja told CNBC that he sees demand for fully electric vehicles growing in the US despite recent changes and slowdowns.
In its energy storage business, Redwood Materials has been striking deals with fellow partners Ford, Rivian and others, and built a 12-megawatt capacity and 63-megawatt-hour microgrid, which he calls “the second largest battery deployment in the world,” in Abilene, Texas, for AI infrastructure company Crusoe.
