Redwood Materials raises another $350M to power up its energy storage business

Battery recycling and cathode manufacturing company Redwood Materials has raised $350 million as it ramps up its nascent energy storage business to power the AI ​​data center boom.

The Series E round, led by venture firm Eclipse, also included a new strategic investment from Nvidia’s venture capital arm, NVentures. The company’s valuation was not disclosed, but a source familiar with the round told TechCrunch that it was around $6 billion, a billion more than Its previous assessment.

The funds will be used to expand the company’s growing energy storage business as well as its refining and materials manufacturing capabilities. Redwood, founded by former Tesla CTO JB Strobel, plans to hire more engineers and staff for its operations team.

when Redwood materials Founded in 2017, it began building a circular supply chain for batteries by focusing on battery cell manufacturing and recycling scrap from consumer electronics such as cell phone batteries and laptop computers. That business — which continues to grow — involves processing those scrap products and extracting elements that are commonly mined, such as cobalt, nickel and lithium. Redwood supplies those materials back to its customers, which include Panasonic, GM and Toyota.

Redwood has since added new, related pursuits such as cathode production. More recently, it has been launched An energy storage business Thousands of EVs use batteries to provide electricity to companies. The business, known as Redwood Energy, is primarily geared toward serving AI data centers as well as other large-scale industrial sites.

Redwood is sitting on a large amount of EV batteries that have too much life left to put them through the recycling process. The company combines these retired EV batteries with renewable energy sources like wind and solar to create an off-grid system that sends power to AI data centers or industrial sites. The system can be tied to the grid, and Redwood says EV batteries could also be connected to natural gas turbines or future nuclear generators for large-scale energy storage.

It has plenty of supplies. The company recovers more than 70% of all used or discarded battery packs in North America, and not all are immediately recycled. As of June, Redwood stockpiled 1 gigawatt-hour worth of batteries that could be used for energy storage. By 2028, the company plans to deploy 20 gigawatt-hours of grid-scale storage, putting it on track to become the largest recycler of used EV battery packs.