Redwood Materials, Inc.

Redwood Materials, Inc., is an American company headquartered in Carson City, Nevada. The company aims to recycle lithium-ion batteries and produce battery materials for electromobility and electrical storage systems.^[1] Redwood Materials has a valuation of $3.8 billion as of September 2021.

History[]

Redwood Materials was founded by J.B. Straubel, who was co-founder and served as chief technical officer at Tesla, Inc. for 16 years. Redwood is creating 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 recycles, refines, and remanufactures lithium-ion batteries into sustainable materials that can be returned to US cell manufacturers.

Redwood is based in Northern Nevada and is already receiving ~3 GWh annually of lithium-ion batteries already or about 45,000 cars or 20k tons/year of end-of-life batteries. Redwood’s technology recovers more than 95 percent of materials like nickel, cobalt, copper, aluminum, lithium and graphite in a lithium-ion battery.

Redwood then produces strategic battery materials, supplying battery manufacturing partners with anode copper foil and cathode active materials.

Redwood is partnered with companies such as Panasonic, Ford Motor Company, and Amazon.^[2]

In 2021, the company announced it had received $775M from various investors in a round of financing. This will be used to build a production facility that will produce battery materials from recycled materials. 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.^[1]

Investors[]

Investors in Redwood Materials' $775M Series C include T. Rowe Price, Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Ford Motor Company and Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund.^[3]

References[]