Former Tesla chief financial officer Deepak Ahuja has joined Redwood Materials as its new CFO, bringing another familiar Tesla name into a company trying to turn used batteries into a strategic resource for America’s clean energy and data infrastructure race.
Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by JB Straubel, Tesla’s former chief technology officer and current Tesla board member. The company began with a clear mission: recover critical minerals from old batteries and factory scrap, then feed them back into the battery supply chain.
Today, its ambitions have expanded beyond recycling. Redwood is also building battery energy storage systems, including systems made with repurposed “second-life” electric vehicle batteries.
Ahuja’s move is significant because he is not just another finance hire. He first joined Tesla in 2008, helped guide the company through its 2010 IPO, stepped away in 2015, and returned in 2017 for a second stint as CFO until 2019. After Tesla, he worked at Verily Life Sciences and later joined drone delivery company Zipline as chief business and financial officer.
His decision to join Redwood is closely tied to Straubel. Ahuja said he has known Straubel for 18 years and respects him “as a leader, an engineer and as a thinker.” He also pointed to Redwood’s Tesla-linked leadership bench as a reason he felt he could step in with credibility while learning the company’s newer business models.
The timing matters. Redwood is trying to position itself at the intersection of three urgent trends: electric vehicles, critical minerals, and energy storage for power-hungry infrastructure. The company says materials such as lithium, cobalt and nickel should remain within the country, rather than being lost from the domestic supply chain after batteries reach the end of their first life.
Redwood’s business has grown well beyond early-stage battery recycling. The company has raised more than $2.3 billion in venture funding from investors including Google, Nvidia’s NVentures, Microsoft, OMERS and Eclipse. It has also secured a $2 billion loan commitment from the US Department of Energy, and its valuation is now above $6 billion.
Ahuja joins shortly after Redwood cut about 10 percent of its workforce, or 135 jobs, as part of a restructuring that partly redirected resources toward its energy division. Straubel told employees that Redwood’s materials business was moving toward profitability and that the company was seeing momentum in Redwood Energy.
That energy push is already visible. Redwood has partnered with companies including Ford and Rivian, and has built a 12 megawatt, 63 megawatt-hour second-life battery microgrid in Abilene, Texas, for AI infrastructure company Crusoe. The company calls it the largest second-life battery deployment in the world.
For Redwood, old EV batteries are not waste. They are assets that can still store energy or be broken down for minerals needed in new products. That idea is becoming more important as data centers, factories, defense operations and power grids demand more reliable storage.
Ahuja’s arrival gives Redwood a finance leader who has already seen what it takes to scale an electric vehicle company through capital-heavy growth. His next challenge is different but connected: helping a battery recycler and energy storage company prove that the next big opportunity in clean technology may begin after a battery leaves the road.
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