‘Too early’ to talk IPO, Redwood Materials’ incoming CFO says

Redwood Materials has finally found a new chief financial officer roughly a year and a half after its last one departed. He’s a familiar face to the former Tesla executives running the battery recycling and energy storage company.

On Monday, Redwood Materials said it has hired former Tesla finance chief Deepak Ahuja as its new CFO. Ahuja joins an executive team that includes Tesla’s former CTO (JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and CEO) and former Tesla powertrain vice president Colin Campbell (Redwood’s CTO), among a number of other Tesla expats throughout the ranks. Most recently, Ahuja was chief finance and business officer 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 that it’s “too early” to talk about going public.

“Naturally, an IPO is a potential outcome for any private company, and we’ll talk about it when the time is right,” he said. Part of his caution, 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 raised to more than $2 billion and its valuation to over $6 billion. It also added Google’s and Nvidia’s venture arm to its cap table.

“Redwood has, I’d say, the crème de la crème of investors already, who do 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 get equally excited, and will want to come in and invest and offer us, perhaps, good terms as well.”

Ahuja’s appointment comes at a pivotal moment for Redwood Materials. The company recently lost its chief operating officer (another former Tesla exec) to retirement, along with at least three other vice presidents. Those executives left amidst a restructuring that affected 10% of its workforce (or around 135 employees), as TechCrunch first reported last month, while the company shifts resources toward its rapidly growing energy storage business.

Ahuja told TechCrunch he is “excited by very innovative technology solutions that impact our climate [and] that address our energy needs,” and he’s stayed close with Straubel since the pair left Tesla in 2019. In fact, Ahuja told TechCrunch that he’s 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 — all of these are such critical needs for our country and our society that it felt like the right place to be,” he said.

There is an undeniable amount of hype around AI, with SpaceX about to go 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 targeted at helping AI data centers manage their power loads, though Ahuja said he’s not worried about getting swept up in the exuberance.

“I think JB and I both have seen so many cycles of hype and disillusion in our lives that we’re going to be very mindful and conscious of 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 sanity” compared to what’s happening at the software-focused AI companies, he added.