Former Tesla CFO Ahuja joins EV battery recycler Redwood Materials

Electric vehicle battery recycling business launched by Redwood Materials Tesla’s Board member and former CTO JB Straubel is hiring another former Tesla executive, Deepak Ahuja, as CFO, the company announced Monday.

Ahuja served as chief financial officer at Tesla from March 2017 to March 2019, Elon Musk’s second term at the EV and clean energy company. He first joined Tesla in 2008, went public in 2010, briefly resigned in 2015, and was rehired two years later.

Ahuja told CNBC that his relationship with Straubel primarily influenced his decision to join the recycling initiative.

“I have known JB for the last 18 years and have great respect for him as a leader, an engineer and a thinker. Knowing most of the leadership team from Tesla makes it easier for me to step in and build the business with a sense of credibility,” he said. “There are different business models, different areas of growth and capital allocation, and it will still be a learning experience for me.”

Straubel first founded Redwood Materials in 2017 and also ran it while serving as Tesla CTO until July 2019.

The Carson City, Nevada-based startup has raised over $2.3 billion in venture funding from a number of venture firms and strategic backers. Google, NvidiaAdventures of, MicrosoftBetween them, OMERS and Eclipse are receiving $2 billion in loan commitments from the Department of Energy.

Redwood Materials is currently valued at over $6 billion.

The incoming CFO also praised Redwood Materials’ work ensuring critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and others “stay in-country.” Such minerals are vital in the production of consumer electronics, vehicles, defense and energy products.

“This is super motivating to me, the magnitude of how big this is going to get and the critical need for this in the country,” he said.

After resigning from Tesla in 2019, Ahuja served as CFO at Verily Life Sciences and then joined drone delivery company Zipline in 2022, where he served as chief operating and financial officer.

Ranked #46 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor list, Zipline is the world’s largest drone delivery company and has recorded more than 2.3 million commercial deliveries via drone to date. The company recently closed an $800 million financing round at a valuation of $7.8 billion. Zipline’s delivery drones are fully electric.

A Zipline spokesperson told CNBC that Ahuja remains a close advisor to the company.

Redwood Materials considers batteries for EVs and other machines and devices to be among the most valuable energy assets in the country. This is because batteries in vehicles and other devices still have the capacity to store energy at the end of their lifespan, and used batteries generally contain critical minerals that can be extracted and used in new products.

In its early years, Redwood Materials focused on “closed-loop” recycling, taking end-of-life electric vehicle batteries and scrap from auto factories and turning them into raw materials and components to create new battery cells.

Today, the company also builds and uses battery energy storage systems that can store power from intermittent, renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and water for later use. Systems manufactured by Redwood Materials include re-engineered or “second-life” EV batteries.

The data center boom in the US is significantly increasing demand for systems that are also used in factories, defense operations and to stabilize grid operations.

“If we don’t have battery systems, our grid is lagging behind and we can’t have off-grid solutions, even for the large, industrial or commercial needs that we might have,” Ahuja told CNBC.

Ahuja comes to Redwood Materials less than a month after it implemented a restructuring in which it cut about 10% of its headcount, or 135 people, in part to refocus resources on its energy division, TechCrunch reported. was first reported.

The company had been without a CFO for more than a year after previous finance leader Jason Thompson left Redwood Materials to join The Nuclear Company in Reno in December 2024.

“Redwood is the strongest it has ever been today,” Straubel wrote in a widely distributed email informing employees of the cuts on April 15. “The materials business is well on its way to profitability and has an exciting roadmap ahead, and we see great momentum at Redwood Energy.”

Ahuja told CNBC that despite some recent ups and downs, he sees growing demand for all-electric vehicles in the US.

Redwood Materials has agreements in the energy storage business with partners such as: ford, rivya and built a 12-megawatt and 63-megawatt-hour microgrid in Abilene, Texas, for AI infrastructure company Crusoe, which he calls “the world’s second-largest lifetime battery deployment.”