After securing $350 million in new funding, battery recycling and cathode manufacturing company Redwood Materials is reportedly letting go of about 5% of its staff, Bloomberg News reports.
Redwood, which is based in Nevada, has a workforce of roughly 1,200 people, so the layoffs will impact several dozen employees.
Established in 2017 by JB Straubel, Tesla’s former CTO, Redwood Materials started out recycling waste from battery cell manufacturing, consumer electronics, and spent EV batteries. The company recovers valuable elements such as cobalt, nickel, and lithium from these items and resells them to clients like Panasonic. Redwood has also expanded into making cathodes.
Recently, Redwood launched a new venture that repurposes old EV batteries for use in energy storage systems—a market that has grown rapidly alongside the rise of energy-intensive AI data centers. By June, the company had accumulated over 1 gigawatt-hour of batteries for this application.
The $350 million Series E funding round, revealed in October, raised the company’s valuation to approximately $6 billion, as previously noted by TechCrunch. When asked about the job cuts, a company representative declined to provide a statement.
