Former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja joins EV battery recycler Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials, the electric vehicle battery recycling business started by Tesla board member and former CTO JB Straubel, is bringing on another former Tesla executive, Deepak Ahuja, as CFO, the company announced Monday.

Ahuja served as finance chief at Tesla from March 2017 to March 2019, his second term at Elon Musk's EV and clean energy company. He first joined Tesla in 2008, navigated it through an IPO in 2010, briefly resigned in 2015 and was recruited back two years later.

Ahuja told CNBC that his relationship with Straubel primarily influenced his decision to join the recycling startup.

"Knowing JB for the last 18 years, I have huge respect for him as a leader, an engineer and as a thinker. And knowing so many of the leadership team who are from Tesla makes it easier for me to step in with a sense of credibility and build the business," he said. "There are different business models, different areas of growth and capital allocation, that it's still going to be a learning experience for me."

Straubel had originally started Redwood Materials in 2017, running it while concurrently serving as Tesla CTO until July 2019.

The Carson City, Nevada-based startup has raised over $2.3 billion in venture funding from an array of venture firms and strategic backers, including Google, Nvidia's Nventures, Microsoft, OMERS and Eclipse, among them, also securing a $2 billion loan commitment from the Department of Energy.

Redwood Materials now boasts a valuation of over $6 billion.

The incoming CFO also lauded Redwood Materials for work that ensures critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, nickel and others, "stay within the country." Such minerals are crucial for the production of consumer electronics, vehicles, defense and energy products.

"That's super motivating for me — the scale of how much this is going to grow, and the critical need for it in the country," he said.

After he resigned from Tesla in 2019, Ahuja served as CFO of Verily Life Sciences, then in 2022 joined Zipline, the drone delivery company, where he worked as chief business and financial officer.

Zipline, ranked at #46 in the 2025 CNBC Disruptor list, is the world's largest drone delivery company, and has logged more than 2.3 million commercial deliveries via drone to-date. The company recently closed an $800 million round of funding with a valuation of $7.8 billion. Zipline's delivery drones are fully electric.

Redwood Materials views the batteries from EVs, and other machines and devices, as some of the most valuable energy assets in the country. That's because the batteries still have capacity to store energy when they reach the end of their useful life in vehicles and other devices, and in general, spent batteries contain critical minerals that can be extracted, and used in new products.

In its early years, Redwood Materials focused on "closed loop" recycling, taking end-of-life electric vehicle batteries and scrap from car factories, and turning those into raw materials and components to make new battery cells.

Today, the company also builds and deploys battery energy storage systems, which can store power derived from intermittent, renewable energy sources — like solar, wind and water — to use at a later time. The systems made by Redwood Materials include repurposed, or "second-life" EV batteries.

The data center boom in the U.S. is driving significant demand for the systems, which are also used at factories, in defense operations and to stabilize grid operations.

"If we don't have battery systems, our grid is just falling behind, and we can't have off-grid solutions for even large, industrial or commercial needs that we may have," Ahuja told CNBC.

Ahuja arrives at Redwood Materials less than a month after the company implemented a restructuring, in which it cut about 10% of headcount, or 135 people, partly to refocus resources on its energy division, TechCrunch first reported.

"Redwood today is the strongest it's ever been," Straubel wrote in a widely distributed email informing employees of the cuts on April 15. "The materials business is well on its way to profitability and has an exciting road map ahead and we're seeing great momentum in Redwood Energy."

Ahuja told CNBC that he sees demand for fully electric vehicles growing in the U.S. despite some recent ups and downs.

In its energy storage business, Redwood Materials has been striking deals with partners like Ford, Rivian and others, and has built a 12 megawatt and 63 megawatt-hour capacity microgrid, which it calls the "largest second-life battery deployment in the world," in Abilene, Texas, for the AI infrastructure company Crusoe.