Redwood Materials has been on an expansion tear in recent years — growth that has extended the lithium-ion battery recycling and materials startup’s footprint well beyond its Carson City, Nevada headquarters as it locked up deals with Toyota, Panasonic, and, GM, started construction on a South Carolina factory, and made an acquisition in Europe.
And yet, Redwood Materials CTO Colin Campbell saw a gap in the company’s 1,100-person workforce. San Francisco was the answer, Campbell told TechCrunch, a longtime Tesla veteran who took the top tech spot in August 2023.
The company, which was founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, is filling that gap with a new research and development center in San Francisco. The 15,000-square-foot facility located in the city’s Design District is equipped with lab space to support engineers who will eventually work on every point of the battery ecosystem from chemical engineering and cathode science to software and electrical engineering. That work could help improve cathode production, an important component of Redwood’s business, which generated $200 million in revenue in 2024.
The center, which Redwood moved into about a week ago, only has a handful of engineers on site. But Campbell expects it will eventually employ about 50 or more people.“We had a really good year, and we had great revenue,” Campbell said, adding that the company has been limited by its ability to expand. “And what’s limiting our ability to expand the engineering team is hiring. We just need to expand the aperture of where we can hire from. And San Francisco was sort of a logical place for a bunch of different reasons.” High on the list is deep talent pool of hardware and software engineers who are in the Bay Area, he added.
Lithium-ion batteries contain three critical building blocks. There are two electrodes, an anode (negative) on one side and a cathode (positive) on the other. Typically, an electrolyte sits in the middle and acts as the courier to move ions between the electrodes when charging and discharging. Cathode foils, which account for more than half the cost of a battery cell, contain lithium, nickel, and cobalt. R …