Redwood Materials chief operating officer Chris Lister is leaving the battery recycling company to retire, TechCrunch has learned — and he’s not the only executive that recently departed.

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 chief supply chain officer and was quickly promoted to the COO role in 2024. The promotion put him closer in the org chart to Redwood founder and CEO JB Straubel, who was Tesla’s longtime chief technology officer and currently sits on the automaker’s board.

Redwood Materials recently informed employees that Lister was retiring, according to an employee who was granted anonymity to speak about 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 a few days after TechCrunch revealed Redwood Materials recently laid off around 10% of its workforce, or roughly 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 the shuffle will help support the company’s growing energy storage business. Redwood has recently signed deals with automaker Rivian and artificial intelligence company Crusoe to provide refurbished 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 role at Panasonic, according to LinkedIn.

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Mayhew, Urquiza, and Lozano didn’t respond to requests for comment. Redwood declined to specifically comment on their departures, but noted that Straubel said in his all-staff email that he is trying to reduce layers of management at the company.

Straubel also told employees in his message that “parts of the company have expanded faster than needed” and that he was “more excited than ever with our path ahead as we build the most integrated and cost-effective critical materials and energy storage business in the world.”

“We are confident that we can deliver on our critical projects with a smaller team that is more focused,” he wrote. “We have successfully adapted to changes in the market that have bankrupted many of our competitors.”

Topics

Exclusive, JB Straubel, Layoffs, Redwood Materials, Startups

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Sean O'Kane

Sr. Reporter, Transportation

Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.

You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.

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Redwood Materials loses COO amid layoffs, restructuring