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

Source: TechCrunch

Redwood Materials appoints new CFO

Redwood Materials has hired former Tesla finance chief Deepak Ahuja as its new chief financial officer, roughly a year and a half after its previous CFO departed. Ahuja joins an executive team that includes Tesla’s former CTO JB Straubel (Redwood’s founder and CEO) and former Tesla power‑train vice president Colin Campbell (Redwood’s CTO), alongside several other Tesla alumni. Most recently, Ahuja was chief finance and business officer at drone company Zipline.

Funding and IPO outlook

Despite Ahuja’s extensive experience running Tesla’s finances and a hot IPO market for AI‑related data centers, he told TechCrunch that it’s “too early” to discuss going public.

“Naturally, an IPO is a potential outcome for any private company, and we’ll talk about it when the time is right,” Ahuja said.

He noted that Redwood has had no trouble raising capital from blue‑chip investors. In January, the company closed a $425 million Series E funding round, bringing its total capital raised to more than $2 billion and its valuation to over $6 billion. The round added Google’s and Nvidia’s venture arms 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.”

Recent restructuring

Ahuja’s appointment comes at a pivotal moment. Redwood recently lost its chief operating officer (another former Tesla exec) to retirement, along with at least three other vice presidents (source). Those departures occurred amid a restructuring that affected 10 % of the workforce (around 135 employees), as first reported (source). The company is shifting resources toward its rapidly growing energy storage business.

Ahuja’s perspective on technology, AI hype, and the future

Ahuja told TechCrunch he is “excited by very innovative technology solutions that impact our climate [and] that address our energy needs,” and he has stayed close with Straubel since the pair left Tesla (source 1, source 2). He disclosed that he is 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 considerable hype around AI, with companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic rumored to be considering IPOs, and billions being raised to build data centers. Redwood’s energy storage business is initially targeted at helping AI data centers manage their power loads, but Ahuja said he’s not worried about being 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 software‑focused AI companies.