Redwood Materials reportedly cuts 5% of staff after $350M raise

Fresh off a $350 million raise, battery recycler and cathode-maker Redwood Materials is reportedly cutting around 5% of its workforce, according to Bloomberg News.

Nevada-based Redwood employees around 1,200 employees, so the cuts affect a few dozen workers.

The company, founded in 2017 by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, initially focused on recycling scrap from battery cell production, consumer electronics, and used EV batteries. The company extracts materials like cobalt, nickel, and lithium from those discarded goods and then sells them back to its customers, which include Panasonic. Redwood has since added cathode production.

It recently launched a new business that uses those old EV batteries in energy storage products — a sector that has taken off during the boom of power-hungry AI data centers. As of June, the company had stockpiled more than 1 gigawatt-hour’s worth of batteries for this purpose.

The $350 million Series E, announced in October, boosted the company’s valuation to around $6 billion, as TechCrunch previously reported. A spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs.