‘Too early’ to talk IPO, Redwood Materials’ CFO is coming

Redwood Materials finally got a new chief financial officer about a year and a half later his last one left. He is a familiar face to former Tesla executives who run the battery recycling and energy storage company.

On Monday, Redwood Materials said it had hired former Tesla chief financial officer Deepak Ahuja as its new CFO. Ahuja joins a core team that includes Tesla’s former CTO (JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and CEO) and Tesla’s powertrain vice president Colin Campbell (Redwood’s CTO), among several other Tesla exits across the board. Most recently, Ahuja was the director of finance and business at drone company Zipline.

But despite Ahuja’s years running Tesla’s investments, and the hot IPO market for anything related to the AI ​​data center, he tells TechCrunch it’s “too early” to talk about going public.

“Naturally, an IPO is the outcome of any private company, and we will discuss it when the time is right,” he said. Part of his caveat, he said, was because Redwood Materials has so far had little trouble raising money from blue-chip investors. The company in January closed a $425 million Series E funding round that brought its total funding to more than $2 billion and its valuation to more than $6 billion. It also added the hand of Google and Nvidia to its table.

“Redwood has, I would say, the crème de la crème of investors already, who have deep pockets,” Ahuja said. “If they’re happy, they’ll give money. But I’m also hoping that new investors will see what Redwood is doing, they’ll be happy too, and they’ll want to come invest and give us, maybe even better.”

Ahuja’s appointment comes at an important time for Redwood Materials. The company recently lost its chief operating officer (another former Tesla exec) to retirement, as well at least three vice presidents. The management left in the middle of a restructuring that affected 10% of the workforce (or about 135 employees), according to TechCrunch. first report last month, as the company shifts its focus to the fast-growing energy storage business.

Ahuja told TechCrunch that he’s “excited about the new technologies that affect our climate (and) that meet our energy needs,” and he’s been close to Straubel since the pair. he left Tesla in 2019. Instead, Ahuja told TechCrunch that it’s a “small investment” in Redwood Materials.

“In many ways, it felt like the right thing for the environment, in terms of the energy storage business, the recycling business – all of these things are so important to our country and our people that it felt like the right place to be,” he said.

There is an undeniable buzz around AI, with SpaceX about to go public, rumors of OpenAI and Anthropic considering IPOs, and billions of dollars being raised to build data centers. Redwood’s energy storage business is initially focused on helping data centers use AI to manage their energy, though Ahuja said he doesn’t worry about getting swept up in the excitement.

“I think JB and I have seen a lot of confusing and frustrating things in our lives so we’re going to be careful and conscious about how we talk, how we manage, and how we grow the company,” he said. “We’re dealing with hardware here, which, by definition, brings a certain purity” compared to what’s happening at AI companies that focus on software, he added.