Redwood Materials

Overview

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. It is headquartered in Carson City, Nevada, where its primary recycling and production facility operates. The 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 and anode copper foil for 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. Recycling and materials are deeply linked, since recycled material feeds the manufacturing process, and the company also buys raw materials to supplement recycled feedstock as it scales. By 2024 it had about $200 million in revenue and roughly 1,100 employees.

Recycling & materials

Facilities & manufacturing

The primary facility is in the Reno-Sparks-Carson City metro area of Nevada, running recycling processing plus initial CAM and anode copper foil production lines. Nevada was deliberate: 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 runs 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 at Camp Hall in Ridgeville, South Carolina. Designed for fully electric operations, the 600-acre campus began its first phase of critical-materials recovery in November 2025 and will ramp CAM and copper foil production over the following years toward roughly 100 GWh of annual materials output. South Carolina was chosen for proximity to a growing cluster of EV and battery manufacturing in the Southeast, where BMW, Volvo, and Mercedes-Benz all have major facilities.

In September 2023, Redwood acquired Redux, a battery recycler based in Bremerhaven, Germany, 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.

Redwood Energy

In June 2025, Redwood launched Redwood Energy, deploying second-life EV batteries as grid storage. The premise is that many EV batteries retain 70% to 80% of original capacity when removed from vehicles, which makes them viable for stationary storage well below the cost of new cells. Redwood, which takes in a large majority of North America's end-of-life lithium-ion batteries through recycling, has a built-in supply of candidates before any material needs processing.

The core technology is a pack manager, a universal interface layer letting Redwood's systems work with 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 first major deployment was a 12 MW / 63 MWh microgrid at the Nevada campus for Crusoe, an AI data center operator, described as the largest second-life battery deployment in the world; in March 2026 it expanded to power roughly seven times the original compute. A 10 MWh system using Riviansecond-life packs went into Rivian's Illinois factory. GM, which signed an initial storage MOU in July 2025, expanded in June 2026 into a full battery-lifecycle partnership, adding a 1.5 MW / 7.2 MWh project in Michigan.

By late 2025, Redwood Energy had more than 1 GWh of grid-ready batteries stockpiled and over 5 GWh in its pipeline, and it targets 20 GWh deployed by 2028. Safety certification, specifically UL 9540A fire testing for second-life systems, is the primary constraint on deployment speed rather than battery supply.

Funding & financial position

Redwood has raised roughly $2.3 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, and Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund. The $1 billion Series D in 2023 set an internal valuation of $5 billion. The Series E, led by Eclipse Ventures with participation from Nvidia's NVentures, opened at $350 million in October 2025 above a $6 billion valuation and reached a $425 million final close in January 2026 with Google joining. The company restructured twice around the raise, cutting about 5% of its workforce in November 2025 and roughly 10%, about 135 people, in April 2026, reallocating toward energy storage. In May 2026 it named former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja as chief financial officer, a seat vacant since late 2024; COO Chris Lister retired around the April 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 the Nevada expansion. Redwood quietly withdrew in the fall of 2024, ahead of a broader review of DOE loan commitments, saying 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 not yet fully committed.

Strategy & outlook

The long-term bet is that the U.S. needs a domestic supply chain for battery materials and that recycled content will be cost-competitive and regulatorily preferred by the 2030s. The IRA's advanced manufacturing credits and domestic content bonuses for EV tax credits both create incentives for U.S. cell manufacturers to source domestically. If those hold, the 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 does not depend on the long recycled-feedstock ramp. The data center market's urgent need for dispatchable power, combined with a steady supply of second-life batteries, creates a market the company can serve now rather than waiting for the EV fleet to age. The expanded GM partnership and the Crusoe deployment suggest it is gaining commercial traction.

Key considerations

The feedstock timing problem is the most important structural challenge. Redwood needs large volumes of end-of-life EV batteries to fully realize its recycled materials model, and most EV batteries sold to date are still in service. Manufacturing scrap bridges the gap today, and it is less predictable and not available in the volumes a mature recycling stream would provide. Capacity plans targeting 100 GWh a 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 face direct price competition from producers who currently manufacture at meaningfully lower cost. Withdrawing from the $2 billion DOE loan also removed a significant source of low-cost capital for the South Carolina buildout.

EV adoption pace affects Redwood on both sides: supply, through recycling feedstock, and demand, through the volumes of CAM and copper foil cell manufacturers need. A slowdown, as in 2024 when several major automakers pulled back production targets, reduces near-term demand for materials and the long-term pace at which end-of-life batteries flow in. Panasonic, the anchor CAM customer, has also slowed the ramp of its Kansas cell plant amid soft EV demand, tempering near-term offtake.

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