Updated Mon, May 11 2026 3:42 PM EDT Wall Street sees 'changing of the guard in AI' as Intel, AMD shares soar while Nvidia lags After he resigned from Tesla in 2019, Ahuja served as CFO of Verily Life Sciences, then in 2022 joined Zipline, the drone delivery company, where he worked as chief business and financial officer. Zipline, ranked at #46 in the 2025 CNBC Disruptor list, is the world's largest drone delivery company, and has logged more than 2.3 million commercial deliveries via drone to-date. The company recently closed an $800 million round of funding with a valuation of $7.8 billion. Zipline's delivery drones are fully electric. A Zipline spokesperson told CNBC that Ahuja remains a close advisor to the company. Redwood Materials views the batteries from EVs, and other machines and devices, as some of the most valuable energy assets in the country. That's because the batteries still have capacity to store energy when they reach the end of their useful life in vehicles and other devices, and in general, spent batteries contain critical minerals that can be extracted, and used in new products. In its early years, Redwood Materials focused on "closed loop" recycling, taking end-of-life electric vehicle batteries and scrap from car factories, and turning those into raw materials and components to make new battery cells. Today, the company also builds and deploys battery energy storage systems, which can store power derived from intermittent, renewable energy sources — like solar, wind and water — to use at a later time. The systems made by Redwood Materials include repurposed, or "second-life" EV batteries. The data center boom in the U.S. is driving significant demand for the systems, which are also used at factories, in defense operations and to stabilize grid operations. "If we don't have battery systems, our grid is just falling behind, and we can't have off-grid solutions for even large, industrial or commercial needs that we may have," Ahuja told CNBC. Ahuja arrives at Redwood Materials less than a month after the company implemented a restructuring, in which it cut about 10% of headcount, or 135 people, partly to refocus resources on its energy division, TechCrunch first reported. The company had been without a CFO for more than a year after its prior finance leader, Jason Thompson, left Redwood Materials and joined The Nuclear Company in Reno in December 2024. "Redwood today is the strongest it's ever been," Straubel wrote in a widely distributed email informing employees of the cuts on April 15. "The materials business is well on its way to profitability and has an exciting road map ahead and we're seeing great momentum in Redwood Energy." Ahuja told CNBC that he sees demand for fully electric vehicles growing in the U.S. despite some recent ups and downs. In its energy storage business, Redwood Materials has been striking deals with partners like Ford