Redwood Materials loses COO amid layoffs, restructuring

Redwood Materials CEO Chris Lister is leaving the battery recycling company to retire, TechCrunch has learned — and he’s not the only executive who recently left.

Lister, a former vice president who led operations at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, has been with Redwood since late 2023. He started as the company’s CEO and was promoted to the position of COO in 2024. The promotion brought him closer up the organizational chart to Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel, the automaker’s longtime executive. the board.

Redwood Materials recently notified employees that Lister is retiring, according to an employee who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the announcement. The company confirmed Lister’s departure to TechCrunch on Thursday. “We wish him the best in his retirement,” a spokesperson said via email.

News of Lister’s retirement comes just days after TechCrunch reported that Redwood Materials recently laid off about 10% of its workforce, or about 135 employees.

Those cuts were part of a restructuring that Straubel told employees about in an email viewed by TechCrunch earlier this week. He said this exchange will help support the growing business of the electricity storage company. Redwood recently signed deals with automaker Rivian and artificial intelligence company Crusoe to supply renewable batteries that can be used as grid storage.

Other executives have left Redwood in recent months, too.

Bradley Mayhew, Redwood’s vice president of integrated supply chain and a former Tesla employee, left the company earlier this month, according to LinkedIn. Guillermo Urquiza, Redwood’s vice president of mechanical engineering — and another former Tesla employee — left in March. And Carlos Lozano, the company’s vice president of manufacturing, left earlier this year for a leadership position at Panasonic, according to LinkedIn.

Mayhew, Urquiza, and Lozano did not respond to requests for comment. Redwood declined to comment directly on their departures, but noted that Straubel said in an email to all employees that he was trying to reduce the layers of management at the company.

Straubel also told employees in his message that “parts of the company have grown faster than needed” and that he is “more excited than ever about the direction we’re going as we build the most integrated and cost-effective things and energy storage business in the world.”

“We are confident that we can accomplish our important projects with a small, highly focused team,” he wrote. “We have successfully adapted to changes in the market that have included many of our competitors.”