Tesla Director of Quality leaves for JB Straubel’s Redwood Materials

Redwood Materials, the battery materials and recycling company founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, hired Tesla’s Director of Quality Bruce Watson away from the electric automaker.

Straubel’s Redwood Materials was best known as a Nevada-based company developing new processes to recycle materials with a focus on electric car batteries, but the company announced that it is also getting into cathode and anode production with a 100 GWh battery material factory in the US.

The company is trying to create a full loop supply chain for battery production in the US.

Redwood Materials has been known to hire from Tesla. Andrew Stevenson, Redwood’s CFO until last year, worked under Straubel at Tesla.

Last year, Redwood also brought in Kevin Kassekert, long-time head of infrastructure at Tesla and, more recently, the head of HR, as new chief operation officer.

Redwood also hired Christ Ford, Tesla’s former senior manager of global service operations and maintenance for energy products.

Now we learn that Tesla is losing its director of quality at Gigafactory Nevada, Bruce Watson, to Redwood.

Watson announced his move on LinkedIn:

“After more than four amazing years at Tesla, I am excited to announce that I have joined Redwood Materials as the VP of Quality. Redwood is creating the world’s first circular supply chain for electric vehicles and clean energy products by recycling lithium ion batteries to their base metals and then locally remanufacturing them into cathode and anode copper foil. Our battery materials facility (location to be announced in early 2022) will produce 100 GWh of cathode to produce 1 million electric vehicles and 500 GWh for 5 million vehicles in 2030. Together, with our incredible employees, we will transform the battery materials industry and create a clean and sustainable supply of materials for electric vehicles.”

As we previously reported, Redwood Materials recently raised $775 million to accelerate its plans and it also partnered with Ford.