Every private company connected to the AI build-out is being asked the same question right now: when do you go public?
SpaceX is gearing up, OpenAI and Anthropic are rumored to be next, and the IPO window for anything tied to AI infrastructure is wide open.
Redwood Materials just hired a CFO who knows how to take a company public, and his answer on a Redwood IPO is: not yet.
Deepak Ahuja, Tesla's former finance chief, is joining Redwood as CFO. It's a Tesla reunion of sorts, since Redwood was founded by Tesla's former CTO JB Straubel, and the CTO seat is held by another Tesla powertrain alum.
Most recently, Ahuja was running finance at drone company Zipline. He told TechCrunch it's "too early" to talk about going public, even with the IPO market wide open.
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The simple reason Redwood is staying private is that it doesn't need the money.
In January, the company closed a $425 million Series E, pushing total capital raised over $2 billion and the valuation north of $6 billion.
Google's and Nvidia's venture arms are on the cap table - two of the deepest pockets in tech.
"Redwood has, I'd say, the crème de la crème of investors already," Ahuja told TechCrunch. "If they're excited, they'll fund."
The company started as a battery recycling business and is now pivoting hard into energy storage, with its first customer being the AI data center industry, which is putting heavy demand on power grids across the U.S.
That shift hasn't been clean. The company recently lost its COO to retirement along with at least three other VPs, while restructuring about 10% of its workforce - roughly 135 employees.
The pivot makes sense on paper, since AI data centers need a steady source of stored power to handle wild demand swings. Redwood is one of the few U.S. companies trying to build a domestic supply chain for that storage hardware.
Ahuja knows the cycle, having left Tesla with Straubel in 2019, long before the post-pandemic EV boom and bust.
He told TechCrunch they've "seen so many cycles of hype and disillusion" and plan to be cautious, adding that hardware brings "a certain degree of sanity" compared to the AI software side.
The IPO market is treating AI like it can do no wrong. Redwood's new CFO is reminding everyone it can.
A company sitting on $2 billion in committed capital from Google and Nvidia has the luxury of waiting, and Redwood's plan is to use it. Most private companies in this cycle don't have that option.
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