Redwood Materials reportedly cut 5% of staff after a $350 million raise

New, worth $350 million raisesBattery recycler and cathode maker Redwood Materials is reportedly cutting about 5% of its workforce, according to Redwood Materials. Bloomberg News.

The Redwood, Nevada-based company has about 1,200 employees, so the cuts affect a few dozen workers.

The company, founded in 2017 by Tesla CTO JB Straubel, initially focused on recycling scrap generated by the production of battery cells, consumer electronics, and used electric vehicle batteries. The company extracts materials such as cobalt, nickel and lithium from these discarded goods and then sells them back to its customers, including Panasonic. Redwood has since added cathode production.

It recently launched a new company that uses old electric car batteries in energy storage products — a sector that took off during the boom in power-hungry AI data centers. As of June, the company has stored more than 1 gigawatt-hour of batteries for this purpose.

The $350 million Series E, announced in October, boosted the company’s value to about $6 billion, as reported by TechCrunch. I mentioned previously. A company spokesman declined to comment on the layoffs.