Former Tesla chief financial officer Deepak Ahuja is joining battery recycler Redwood Materials as CFO.

Redwood said on May 11 Ahuja has decades of financial leadership experience, including serving as Tesla’s CFO across two tenures, where he helped take the company from early-stage startup through its 2010 IPO and on to the global company it is today.

After Tesla, he worked as CFO of Verily Life Sciences and then as chief business and financial officer at Zipline, the drone delivery and logistics company.

Ahuja said: “To stay globally competitive, America needs far more energy storage capacity and a reliable, domestic supply of critical minerals — cobalt, nickel, lithium — that are foundational not just to batteries, but to a range of industries where domestic sourcing carries the highest strategic value.”

Redwood is one of a just a few companies positioned to supply these minerals at scale, from a domestic supply chain that no competitor can replicate, Ahuja said.

“Every second-life battery we deploy keeps critical minerals inside the US, reducing the cost of storage, and strengthening the grid at a moment when the grid needs it most.”

Last October, Redwood Materials said it had closed a $350 million funding round to accelerate the firm’s creation of a new generation of US-made energy storage systems.