‘It’s too early’ to talk about an IPO, says Redwood Materials’ incoming CFO

Redwood Materials has finally found a new CFO about a year and a half after its last one left. He’s a familiar face to the former Tesla executives who run the battery recycling and energy storage company.

Redwood Materials said Monday it has appointed former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja as its new CFO. Ahuja joins an executive team that includes former Tesla CTO (JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood) and former Tesla VP of Powertrain Colin Campbell (CTO of Redwood), among a number of other Tesla expatriates across all ranks. Most recently, Ahuja was the CFO and Business Director 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.

“Of course, an IPO is a possible outcome for any private company, and we will talk about it when the time is right,” he said. He said part of his caution is because Redwood Materials has not yet had trouble raising money from big investors. The company in January closed a $425 million Series E funding round, bringing its total capital to more than $2 billion and its valuation to more than $6 billion. It also added Google and Nvidia’s investment arm to its cap table.

“I would say Redwood really has the crème de la crème of investors, who have deep pockets,” Ahuja said. “If they’re excited, they’ll fund. But I also expect new investors will see what Redwood is doing, and they’ll be just as excited, and they’ll want to come in and invest and offer us 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 executive) to retirement, along with at least three other vice presidents. Those executives departed amid a restructuring that affected 10% of its workforce (or about 135 employees), as TechCrunch first reported last month, as the company shifts resources toward its fast-growing energy storage business.

Ahuja told TechCrunch that he is “passionate about highly innovative technology solutions that impact our climate [and] “Which meets our energy needs,” and he has remained close to Straubel since the pair left Tesla in 2019. In fact, Ahuja told TechCrunch that he is a “small investor” in Redwood Materials.

“In many ways, it seemed like a natural fit, in terms of the energy storage business, the recycling business — all of these are needs that are so critical to our country and our community that it just seemed like the right place to be,” he said.

There’s an undeniable amount of hype around AI, with SpaceX about to go public, OpenAI and Anthropic rumored to be considering an IPO, and billions of dollars being raised to build data centers. Redwood’s energy storage business is initially aimed at helping AI data centers manage their power loads, though Ahuja said he’s not worried about a drift in abundance.

“I think JP and I have seen so many cycles of hype and disillusionment in our lives that we’re going to be very aware and cognizant of how we message, how we manage, how we grow the company,” he said. “We’re dealing with hardware here, which, by definition, provides a certain degree of rationality” compared to what happens at software-focused AI companies, he added.