Redwood Materials, which recycles old lithium-ion batteries and makes components for new ones, said it’s raised more than $1 billion in a new funding round as the company works to set up some of the first U.S. production facilities making anode and cathode materials for electric vehicle batteries.
Led by JB Straubel, a Tesla board member who was also one of the company’s five cofounders and its former chief technology officer, Carson City, Nevada-based Redwood has raised about $2 billion since 2019, the company said in an emailed statement. Early this year it also qualified for a $2 billion low-interest federal loan. Its valuation now tops $5 billion.
While Redwood initially focused on recovering lithium, graphite, copper, cobalt and other high-value metals from spent batteries and production scraps, it’s expanded its operations to produce copper foil for anodes and plans to produce cathodes, essential battery components now made almost entirely in China, South Korea and Japan.
“There’s a lot of capital and a lot of projects announced and under construction in (battery) cell manufacturing—over 800 gigawatt-hours per year in just the U.S. before the end of this decade,” Straubel told Forbes earlier this year. But little of that investment has been for domestic anode and cathode production.
“Business-strategy-wise, there’s a gap and a problem in the supply chain,” he said at the time. “It may not be the sexiest part of the whole (EV) realm to invest in but I think it’s urgent and may become more of a bottleneck. So we’re very focused there.”
Redwood’s campus near Reno, where it first began recycling operations, has begun producing copper foil that the closely held company supplies to Panasonic. It’s also building a $3.5 billion plant near Charleston, South Carolina, to supply new battery plants popping up across the U.S. Southeast with anode and cathode materials, partially made with recycled materials.
Goldman Sachs, Capricorn and T. Rowe Price co-led Redwood’s new Series D round. First-time investors included Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, or OMERS.
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