Ahuja fills a seat that sat vacant for well over a year; his predecessor, Jason Thompson, departed in December 2024 to take a role at The Nuclear Company in Reno, according to CNBC.
The new hire arrives weeks after a round of cuts trimmed roughly 135 positions — equal to about a tenth of the total headcount — as part of a broader pivot to prioritize the energy storage side of the business, TechCrunch first reported. The company's COO and at least three vice presidents also departed around the same time.
Ahuja told TechCrunch that an IPO is "too early" to discuss, citing the company's strong existing investor base. A $425 million Series E round completed in January pushed the company's cumulative fundraising past $2 billion and put its valuation above $6 billion. Investors include Google $GOOGL, Nvidia $NVDA's venture arm, Microsoft $MSFT, and OMERS, among others. The company has also secured a $2 billion loan commitment from the Department of Energy.
Ahuja said his long-standing relationship with Straubel was a primary factor in his decision to join. "Knowing JB for the last 18 years, I have huge respect for him as a leader, an engineer and as a thinker," Ahuja told CNBC. He added that he has been an investor in Redwood Materials for several years.
On the company's energy storage opportunity, Ahuja pointed to growing demand from data centers, industrial facilities, and defense installations that cannot wait for traditional grid expansion. "If we don't have battery systems, our grid is just falling behind, and we can't have off-grid solutions for even large, industrial or commercial needs that we may have," he told CNBC.
Among the milestones Redwood Materials is pointing to is a microgrid project in Abilene, Texas — a 12-megawatt, 63-megawatt-hour installation serving AI infrastructure firm Crusoe that the company bills as the world's biggest deployment of second-life batteries to date.
