Redwood Materials is a battery recycling and materials manufacturing company founded in 2017 by JB Straubel, who spent 16 years at Tesla as co-founder and chief technology officer. The company is headquartered in Carson City, Nevada, where its primary recycling and production facility operates. Redwood's mission is to build a domestic supply chain for battery materials — recovering lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper from spent cells and manufacturing them back into cathode active material (CAM) and anode copper foil that can be used to make new batteries.
The company runs three related businesses: battery recycling, battery materials manufacturing, and (since June 2025) Redwood Energy, which deploys second-life EV batteries as grid storage systems. The recycling and materials businesses are deeply linked — recycled material feeds the manufacturing process — but the company also purchases raw materials to supplement recycled feedstock as it scales production. By 2024 the company had about $200 million in revenue and roughly 1,100 employees.
Redwood collects end-of-life lithium-ion batteries from EVs, consumer electronics, and — most significantly at current scale — manufacturing scrap from cell producers. The scrap from cell production is the largest feedstock source today because the volume of retired EV batteries is still small; that balance will shift through the late 2020s and 2030s as the early EV fleet reaches end of life. Redwood processes incoming material through hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical steps to recover more than 95% of critical metals by mass, including lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper. Recovery rates at that level are competitive with or better than primary mining for the same materials, with a substantially lower carbon footprint. Redwood receives batteries from partners including Panasonic, Ford, Volvo, Toyota, BMW, GM, and Amazon through take-back and logistics agreements.
Cathode active material is the most chemically complex and cost-intensive component of a lithium-ion cell, and its production is almost entirely dominated by Chinese and Korean suppliers. Redwood began producing CAM at its Nevada facility at the end of 2023, targeting 100,000 metric tons per year of capacity — enough for approximately 1 million electric vehicles annually. Panasonic is the anchor customer, sourcing CAM for its new Kansas battery cell plant. Producing battery-grade CAM domestically requires controlling the chemistry of the recovered metals and blending them into precise stoichiometric compounds, a process that Redwood has built out alongside its recycling operations rather than as a separate business.
Copper foil — a thin conductor that forms the current collector in battery anodes — is another component produced almost entirely in Asia, primarily China. Redwood began producing anode copper foil at its Nevada facility in 2023. Panasonic was the first customer, sourcing foil for its Nevada Gigafactory cell production. The target capacity is 36,000 metric tons per year. Like CAM, domestic copper foil production benefits from IRA domestic content provisions that can make domestically sourced material more economically attractive to U.S. cell manufacturers even if the per-ton cost is higher than Asian alternatives.
Redwood's primary facility is in the Reno-Sparks-Carson City metro area of Nevada, where it operates recycling processing and its initial CAM and anode copper foil production lines. Nevada was a deliberate choice: proximity to Tesla's Gigafactory and Panasonic's cell production, access to lithium mining in the Nevada Basin, and favorable state permitting. The Sparks facility also operates retired EV batteries as solar backup storage for a data center.
In January 2024, Redwood broke ground on a $3.5 billion battery materials campus in North Charleston, South Carolina. The facility is designed for 100% electric operations and will add significant CAM and copper foil production capacity once construction completes, with the Nevada facility expected to wrap in the first half of 2027. South Carolina was selected for its proximity to a growing cluster of EV and battery manufacturing in the Southeast — BMW, Volvo, and Mercedes-Benz all have major facilities in the region.
In 2023, Redwood acquired Redux, a German battery recycling company, establishing a European processing footprint. European battery regulations, including mandated recycled content in new cells, create a long-term regulatory pull for Redwood's materials in that market.
In June 2025, Redwood launched Redwood Energy, a business that deploys second-life EV batteries as grid storage systems. The premise is that many EV batteries retain 70–80% of their original capacity when removed from vehicles, making them viable for stationary storage applications at a cost well below new cells. Redwood receives more than 20 GWh of batteries annually through its recycling operations, giving it a built-in supply of potential storage candidates before any material needs to be processed.
The proprietary technology is a "pack manager" — a universal interface layer that lets Redwood's systems work with battery packs from different manufacturers at different voltages, protocols, and states of health. Systems are built open-air on cable trays rather than enclosed in HVAC-cooled containers, which removes a major cost and maintenance burden. Older packs cycle gently; fresher ones take heavier load. The company's first major deployment was a 12 MW / 63 MWh microgrid for Crusoe, an AI data center operator — the largest second-life battery deployment in the world and the largest microgrid in North America at the time of completion. A 10 MWh system using Rivian second-life packs was deployed at Rivian's Illinois factory. In July 2025, GM signed an MOU to pursue stationary storage using both second-life GM EV batteries and new modules from Redwood.
By late 2025, Redwood Energy had more than 1 GWh of grid-ready batteries in its pipeline, with an additional 5 GWh expected to become available over the following year. Safety certification — specifically UL 9540A fire testing for second-life systems — is the primary constraint on deployment speed, not battery supply.
Redwood has raised approximately $2.22 billion in equity across five rounds. The $40 million seed in 2019 included Amazon and Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The $775 million Series C in 2021 brought in T. Rowe Price, Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Ford Motor Company, and Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund. The $1 billion Series D in 2023 set an internal valuation of $5 billion. The $350 million Series E in October 2025, led by Eclipse Capital with participation from Nvidia's NVentures, raised the valuation to approximately $6 billion. Within weeks of the Series E closing, Redwood cut about 5% of its workforce in a restructuring.
In February 2023, the Department of Energy issued a conditional commitment for a $2 billion loan through the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program to fund Redwood's Nevada expansion. Redwood quietly withdrew from the loan in the fall of 2024 — ahead of the Trump administration's broader review of DOE loan commitments — stating that its private funding position made the loan unnecessary. Whether the withdrawal was driven by the changing political environment, evolving financing strategy, or both was not publicly clarified. The South Carolina plant's $3.5 billion capital cost will require substantial additional debt or equity financing not yet fully committed.
Redwood's long-term bet is that the U.S. needs a domestic supply chain for battery materials and that recycled content will be a cost-competitive and regulatorily preferred source of that supply by the 2030s. The IRA's advanced manufacturing credits and domestic content bonuses for EV tax credits both create economic incentives for U.S. cell manufacturers to source domestically. If those incentives hold, Redwood's Nevada and South Carolina facilities are positioned to capture a large share of domestic CAM and anode copper foil demand.
Redwood Energy adds a near-term revenue stream that doesn't depend on the long recycled-feedstock ramp. The data center market's urgent need for dispatchable power, combined with Redwood's steady supply of second-life batteries, creates a market that the company can serve now rather than waiting for the EV fleet to age. The GM MOU and the Crusoe deployment suggest this business is gaining commercial traction.
The feedstock timing problem is Redwood's most important structural challenge. The company needs large volumes of end-of-life EV batteries to fully realize its recycled materials model, but most of the EV batteries sold to date are still in service. Manufacturing scrap from cell producers bridges this gap today, but it is less predictable and not available in the same volumes as a mature recycling stream. Redwood's capacity plans — targeting 100 GWh per year of materials output — run ahead of the recycled feedstock that will exist at scale.
Chinese manufacturers dominate global CAM and anode copper foil production, with cost structures shaped by years of scale and vertically integrated supply chains. If U.S. trade policy or IRA domestic content requirements weaken, Redwood's materials would face direct price competition from Chinese producers who can currently manufacture at meaningfully lower cost. The withdrawal from the $2 billion DOE loan also removes a significant source of low-cost capital for the South Carolina factory buildout.
EV adoption pace affects Redwood on both the supply side (battery recycling feedstock) and the demand side (volumes of CAM and copper foil needed by cell manufacturers). A slowdown in EV growth — as occurred in 2024 when several major automakers pulled back production targets — reduces both the near-term demand for Redwood's materials and the long-term pace at which end-of-life batteries will flow into recycling.
This profile was compiled from publicly available information including:
Redwood Materials corporate website — Company overview, product details, and press releases.
Wikipedia — Redwood Materials — Funding history, partnerships, and milestones.
Axios (May 2025) — DOE loan withdrawal.
Latitude Media — Redwood Energy business model and second-life storage architecture.
TechCrunch (Nov 2025) — Series E and post-raise layoffs.
Canary Media — Crusoe microgrid deployment.
This profile is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security.