Redwood Materials was supposed to be one of the cleanest bets in the battery boom: recycle old packs, recover critical minerals, and feed them back into a domestic supply chain. That business still matters. But by spring 2026, the company is telling a bigger story. JB Straubel is no longer building only a recycling company . He is building an energy infrastructure company that happens to start with batteries. That shift is showing up everywhere. Redwood closed the final leg of a $425 million Series E in January with Google joining the cap table. It expanded its Crusoe data-center microgrid after achieving 99.2% uptime . It announced a 10 MWh second-life battery project with Rivian at the automaker's Illinois factory. Then, in April, it cut about 10 percent of its workforce to focus the company around the businesses it thinks can scale fastest. That combination, new capital, real storage deployments, and a painful restructuring, makes Redwood more interesting than a standard battery recycling profile. The company still wants to close the loop on EV materials. It also wants to capture the surge in electricity demand from AI data centers, manufacturing, and a strained grid that cannot add capacity quickly enough. AI-generated image Redwood still begins with battery collection and processing, but the company's 2026 narrative extends far beyond recycling lines. May 2026 update This profile has been refreshed with Redwood's January Series E close, February R&D expansion, March Crusoe update, April Rivian partnership, and April restructuring. $425M Series E total 10 MWh Rivian factory storage system 99.2% Crusoe microgrid uptime 20+ GWh Annual battery processing Straubel Still Has the Same Thesis, but the Market Moved First AI-generated image Redwood's Nevada operation remains the physical backbone of the company, even as software and storage integration rise in importance. The original Redwood thesis has aged well. The United States still needs domestic sources of lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and graphite. Automakers still need cleaner, closer, and less geopolitically exposed materials. And battery waste is not a future problem anymore. It is an industrial feedstock stream that keeps growing. Redwood says it processes more than 20 gigawatt-hours of batteries each year , with recovery rates above 95 percent for key materials. The Nevada campus remains the center of that operation, while South Carolina adds another large base for materials recovery and downstream scaling. Those assets still justify the company's long-running pitch that recycling is not a side business to the EV transition, it is core infrastructure. What changed in 2026 is demand on the other side of the meter. AI computing, industrial load growth, and slower grid interconnection timelines created an opening for battery systems that can be installed faster than transmission, peaker plants, or a brand-new utility-scale buildout. Redwood already had access to batteries, pack expertise, and power electronics talent. It did not need to invent a new supply chain to chase that opportunity. Funding and scale markers • 2017: Redwood founded in Nevada by JB Straubel. • 2023: Series D pushes total private funding above $2 billion. • Jan. 2026: Series E reaches $425 million, with Google joining existing investors. • 2026 valuation: Roughly $6 billion post-money. • Operating scale: More than 20 GWh of batteries processed annually. Redwood Energy Is No Longer a Side Project If there is one thing this year's updates make clear, it is that Redwood Energy has moved to the center of the company's growth story . Redwood expanded its San Francisco R&D footprint more than fourfold in February, saying energy storage had become the fastest-growing part of the business. That is not the language of a pilot program. It is the language of a company reallocating engineering weight. The clearest proof came in March. Redwood said its 12 MW / 63 MWh microgrid project with Crusoe, built with solar and repurposed EV batteries, delivered 99.2 percent operational availability . On the strength of that performance, Crusoe and Redwood expanded the campus deployment to support 20 more modular data centers, bringing compute density to nearly seven times the original scale. That matters because it turns second-life battery rhetoric into operating evidence. Plenty of companies can describe a circular battery economy. Far fewer can point to a live data-center power system running continuously, at scale, with measurable uptime and a follow-on expansion order. AI-generated image Redwood's chemistry and recovery know-how still matters, but 2026 has made system integration and software far more visible inside the business. Redwood reinforced that pitch again in March when it said its energy storage systems passed the new large-scale fire and deflagration tests in UL 9540A 6th Edition . The company argued that its open-architecture design prevents gas accumulation and limits propagation risk, a direct answer to one of the industry's biggest concerns around stationary storage. Safety certification alone does not create a market, but it removes one more excuse for customers to wait. The Rivian Deal Shows the Second-Life Model in Plain English The April partnership with Rivian is one of Redwood's most concrete demonstrations yet. Rivian will send more than 100 second-life battery packs into a Redwood Energy system at its Normal, Illinois manufacturing site. The initial system will provide 10 MWh of dispatchable energy to cut costs and reduce peak grid load. This is a practical use case with almost no abstraction. A factory already has retired or retiring battery assets. Redwood integrates them with its Pack Manager technology. The plant gets on-site storage without waiting for a utility to solve everything upstream. If it works as advertised, the model can repeat across other automakers, fleets, warehouses, and industrial campuses. That is the real strategic appeal of second life. Redwood does not have to choose between reusing a battery and recycling it. It can extend the battery's economic life in stationary service first, then recover the materials later. The company gets another revenue layer before the shredder ever turns on. • Crusoe: Large second-life battery microgrid for AI compute, expanded after 99.2% uptime. • Rivian: 10 MWh manufacturing-site system using more than 100 second-life packs. • Google: New Series E investor with obvious interest in data-center power resilience. • San Francisco R&D: Expanded to support energy systems engineering, integration, and deployment. The April Layoffs Are the Part of the Story Investors Should Not Ignore AI-generated image A circular battery business sounds tidy on paper. In practice, it still has to survive changing demand, shifting margins, and a difficult capital market. Redwood's April layoffs, about 135 employees or roughly 10 percent of staff according to TechCrunch, do not fit the clean hero narrative. They do, however, fit the current battery market. U.S. EV timelines have slipped. Some recyclers and materials startups are running out of runway. Capital is still available, but it is more selective, and investors want evidence that growth businesses are pointed at real demand. Straubel told employees the cuts were about focus, not distress, and said the materials business is on a path toward profitability. That may be true. It is also true that companies do not cut this deeply a few months after a large financing round unless they think parts of the organization expanded faster than the market justified. Redwood appears to be concentrating resources on the activities with the clearest near-term pull: storage systems, systems integration, and energy customers that need capacity now. That does not mean the recycling and materials business is fading. It means the highest-growth narrative has shifted. In 2021, investors wanted battery recycling exposure. In 2026, they also want expo