As demand for energy skyrockets amid the rise of AI, one of Tesla‘s co-founders is betting on a new solution: giving old electric vehicle batteries a second-life.
JB Straubel, who helped launch Tesla and served as its tech chief until 2019, founded Redwood Materials in 2017 to recycle batteries and build a closed-loop supply chain for EVs. But as Redwood started receiving more EV batteries, the startup noticed that most still had usable capacity. Rather than recycle those batteries, Redwood is now repurposing them for microgrid projects that could provide cheap energy storage for new and existing data centers.
“We’re just finding a way to basically wring a little bit more value out of those batteries,” Straubel told CNBC.
For its first microgrid, Redwood partnered with Crusoe, best known for the massive AI data center it is building in Abilene, Texas, as part of Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project backed by OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and others. Redwood says its system is the largest of its kind in North America. It generates 12 megawatts of power through a solar array, and has 63 megawatt-hours of capacity using the repurposed EV batteries.
“In the energy industry, the holy grail has been 24/7 renewable power, but forever the cost of batteries was too high, until today,” says Cully Cavness, Crusoe co-founder, COO and president.
The global data center market is experiencing a surge in growth due to the AI boom. According to Goldman Sachs, AI is estimated to drive a 165% increase in data center power demand by 2030. Redwood and Crusoe said they see data centers as a key beneficiary of the technology, helping hyperscalers deploy with speed and power redundancy, at an affordable cost.
“This is cost effective, rapidly deployable, scalable 24/7 renewable power and AI data center computing as one integrated package,” Cavness said.
Redwood says it has over a gigawatt-hour of reusable batteries in its inventory, the equivalent of 12,500 TVs, and it’s designing 100 plus megawatt projects, up to 10 times the size of the pilot microgrid with Crusoe.
“The scalability of this really doesn’t have a limit,” Straubel told CNBC. “We can use the same type of architecture and scale this up by a factor of 100 or more. We’re already working on engineering projects that are in that type of magnitude.”
In addition to its recycling business, Redwood will now be competing in a growing energy storage market with established players like Tesla, which has built a successful energy business with its Megapack grid-scale storage. But experts say there is plenty of room for new entrants to meet demand.
“The future demand for energy storage specifically is massive, so it’s not surprising that players who traditionally haven’t been in this space are looking to enter,” said Pete Tillotson, senior research analyst with Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “I would imagine this second-life piece is going to be used for more focused, slightly smaller projects. Potentially with clients where cost is a little bit more of a limiter.”
Watch the video to see how Redwood Materials has grown its recycling operations and learn more about its plans to use second-life batteries to meet the surging energy needs of the AI era.
Navan, the business travel, payments, and expense management startup, filed on Friday afternoon to go public.
Its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that the company plans to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “NAVN.”
Navan reported trailing 12-month revenue of $613 million (up 32%) across over 10,000 customers, and gross bookings of $7.6 billion (up 34%), according to the S-1 filing.
Goldman Sachs and Citigroup will act as lead book-running managers for the proposed offering.
Navan ranked No. 39 on this year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, and also made the 2024 list.
The IPO market has bounced back this year, with deal activity up 56% across 156 deals (roughly 200 IPO filings in all) and $30 billion in proceeds, up over 23% year over year, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital. It has been the best year for IPOs since 2021, though still far below the Covid offering boom years, when over $142 billion (2021) and $78 billion (2020) was raised by IPOs.
This year’s deal flow has been highlighted by hot AI names like Coreweave, as well as some of the startup world’s most highly valued firms from the past decade, such as fintech Klarna and design firm Figma, crypto companies Circle, Bullish and Gemini, and some long-awaited IPO candidates finally hitting the market, such as Stubhub this week, though its shares have slumped since the first day of trading. Top Amazon reseller Pattern went public on Friday.
Launched by CEO Ariel Cohen and co-founder Ilan Twig in 2015, Navan set out to disrupt a business travel sector where incumbents relied on clunky legacy tools and fragmented workflows.
The Palo Alto-based company, formerly called TripActions, refers to itself as an “all-in-one super app” for corporate travel and expenses.
Customers include Unilever, Adobe, Christie’s, Blue Origin and Geico.
It has also been pushing further into AI, with a virtual assistant named Ava handling approximately 50% of user interactions during the six months ended July 31, according to the filing, and a proprietary AI framework called Navan Cognition supporting its platform, as well as proprietary cloud infrastructure.
“We built Navan for the road warriors, for CEOs and CFOs who understand travel’s critical importance to their strategy, the finance teams who demand precision and control, the executive assistants juggling itineraries, and the program admins ensuring seamless events,” the co-founders wrote in an IPO filing letter.
“We saw firsthand the frustration of clunky, outdated systems. Travelers were forced to cobble together solutions, wait for hours on hold to book or change travel, and negotiate with travel agents. They struggled to adhere to company policies, with little visibility into those policies, and after all that, they spent even more time on tedious expense reports after a trip. We felt the pain of finance teams struggling to gain visibility into fragmented travel spending and to enforce policies, and the frustration of suppliers unable to connect directly with the high-value business travelers they sought to serve,” they wrote in the filing.
Revenue grew 33% year-over-year from $402 million in fiscal 2024 to $537 million in fiscal 2025, according to the S-1 filing. The company reported a net loss that decreased 45% year-over-year from $332 million in fiscal 2024 to $181 million in fiscal 2025. Gross margin improved from 60% in fiscal 2024 to 68% in fiscal 2025.
The business travel and expense space is crowded, with fellow Disruptors Ramp and Brex, and TravelPerk, as well as incumbents like SAP Concur and American Express Global Business Travel.
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A gamer plays soccer title Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 on an Xbox console.
Sezgin Pancar | Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Microsoft said on Friday that it will increase the recommended retail price of several Xbox consoles in the U.S. starting in October because of “changes in the macroeconomic environment.”
The company said it would not increase prices for accessories such as controllers and headsets, and that prices in other countries would stay the same.
While Microsoft didn’t explicitly attribute the increase to the Trump administration’s tariffs, many consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way. President Donald Trump has issued tariffs this year on multiple countries with a stated goal to bring more manufacturing to the U.S.
“We understand that these changes are challenging, and they were made with careful consideration,” Microsoft said on its website.
It’s the second time Microsoft has raised prices on its consoles in the U.S. this year. Rivals Sony and Nintendo have also raisedconsole prices in the U.S. as Trump’s tariffs went into effect.
Ticket reseller StubHub signage on display at the New York Stock Exchange for the company’s IPO on Sept. 17, 2025.
NYSE
After a long wait to get public, StubHub has had a rough start to life on the New York Stock Exchange.
Shares of the online ticket vendor dropped 10% on Friday, falling for a third straight day since debuting on Wednesday. At $18.46, the stock is now down 21% from its IPO price of $23.50.
StubHub, trading under ticker symbol “STUB,” has lagged behind fellow market newcomers like online lender Klarna, design software company Figma and stablecoin issuer Circle, which delivered early returns for investors following their recent IPOs. Shares of cybersecurity firm Netskope also rose 10% on Friday in their second trading day, after an initial pop on Thursday.
StubHub had been trying to go public for the past several years, but delayed its debut twice. The most recent stall came in April after President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs roiled markets. The company filed an updated prospectus in August, effectively restarting the process to go public, and has since seen its market cap slip to about $6.8 billion from $8.6 billion at its IPO.
Founded in 2000, StubHub primarily generates revenue from connecting buyers with ticket resellers. In the first quarter, revenue rose 10% from a year earlier to $397.6 million. The company’s net loss widened to $35.9 million from $29.7 million a year ago.
StubHub CEO Eric Baker told CNBC on Wednesday that the company expects recently introduced federal regulations around transparent ticket pricing to cause a “one-time” hit to its financial results.
Regulators are zeroing in on online ticket sellers over their pricing mechanisms and whether the companies are doing enough to keep automated purchasing bots in check. The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued StubHub rival Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, accusing it of illegal resale tactics.
While StubHub has failed to excite Wall Street, its struggles haven’t seeped into other deals as the tech IPO market continues to show signs of a resurgence after an extended dry spell. Amazon reseller Pattern Group saw its stock rise 12% on Friday, though shares initially slipped 6%.