While at Tesla, Straubel was part of the company’s founding technical team and contributed to the development of its early battery architecture and power electronics systems. According to Ashlee Vance’s biography
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015), Straubel played a key role in shaping Tesla’s engineering direction, including work that later informed the Gigafactory project for large-scale battery production. Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by
J. B. Straubel, who was a co-founder and served as chief technology officer at
Tesla, Inc. for 16 years. Redwood set out to create a circular supply chain for electric vehicles and clean energy products, making them more sustainable long term and driving down the cost for batteries by developing a fully closed loop for lithium-ion batteries. Redwood sought to
recycle batteries, recapturing valuable materials to help make new batteries. On its website in 2022 Redwood Materials explained that the company received enough end-of-life batteries annually to provide critical materials for new batteries for about 60,000 new electric vehicles. Redwood estimated that it was recovering more than 95% of the metals (including
nickel,
cobalt,
lithium, and
copper) from end-of-life batteries. Redwood then produces strategic battery materials, supplying battery manufacturing partners with anode copper foil and cathode active materials. Along with Ford and
Volvo, Redwood Materials launched a used battery collection program for the state of
California in February of 2022. Ford, Volvo and their dealers planned to work with battery dismantlers and ship old vehicle batteries to Redwood Material's plant in
Carson City, Nevada. Redwood builds and operates a used battery as solar backup for a datacenter at its Sparks facility. In 2021, the company announced it had received $775M from various investors in a financing round. This will be used to build a production facility that will produce battery materials from recycled materials, starting at 6 GWh per year. By 2025, the capacity of the production facilities is to be expanded to 100
GWh, enough for one million electric vehicles. By 2030, capacity is expected to increase to 500 GWh. Redwood acquired German recycling company Redux in 2023. In March 2023 Redwood claimed to have recovered more than 95% of important metals (incl. lithium, cobalt, nickel and copper) from of old
NiMH and Li-Ion packs. In January 2024, Redwood broke ground on a new $3.5 billion battery factory in South Carolina, claiming the factory will use 100% electric operations and 0% fossil fuel use in its process when operational. In May 2024, Redwood was listed by
Time magazine as
one of the 100 most influential companies in 2024. == Investors ==