Redwood Materials, a battery recycler and cathode maker, just raised $350 million in funding and will reportedly cut about 5% of its workforce, according to Bloomberg News.
Nevada-based Redwood has about 1,200 employees, so the layoffs will affect dozens of employees.
The company was founded in 2017 by former Tesla chief technology officer JB Straubel and initially focused on recycling scrap from battery cell manufacturing, consumer electronics, and used EV batteries. The company extracts materials such as cobalt, nickel and lithium from these wastes and resells them to customers including Panasonic. Redwood later added cathode production.
The company recently launched a new business that uses old EV batteries in energy storage products. The field has boomed amid the boom in power-hungry AI data centers. As of June, the company had more than 1 gigawatt-hour of batteries stockpiled for this purpose.
As TechCrunch previously reported, a $350 million Series E announced in October pushed the company’s valuation to about $6 billion. A spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs.
Source link
