US-headquartered battery supply chain developer Redwood Materials raised more than $700m from a group of investors, which featured e-commerce and cloud computing group Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. Funds and accounts advised by investment management firm T Rowe Price led the round, which reportedly valued the company at $3.7bn post-money. The investment syndicate also included investment and financial services group Fidelity, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Baillie Gifford, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Emerson Collective and Franklin Templeton.
Founded in 2017, Redwood is developing a closed loop supply chain for electric vehicle batteries that will involve it partnering large companies to recycle used batteries and feed the useful materials back into the supply chain, thus reducing the industry’s environmental impact. The company has struck recycling partnerships with many businesses including Amazon. It also plans to triple the size of its Carson City, Nevada facility, while constructing a new plant elsewhere in the state.
Redwood Materials may be considered part of the broader batteries and energy storage space, which has received much attention from corporate investors over the past few years, as the GCV Analytics chart below shows. It is noteworthy that, previously, we have seen no more than 40-41 deals in such businesses per year, whereas over the first seven months of 2021 we already tracked 31 rounds raised by such enterprises, with a total estimated capital in them at $3.78bn, far above than dollar figures registered in previous years. This clearly suggests that there is much upward momentum both in the number of deals as well as in valuations.
