Allbirds, the sneaker company once known for its wool runners and sustainability-driven branding, is shedding its footwear roots entirely and reinventing itself as an artificial intelligence infrastructure firm under a new name: Smartbird.
The San Francisco-based company, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker BIRD, said Wednesday that it has completed the sale of its Allbirds shoe and apparel business—as first announced in April— and tapped Nadia Carlsten, a veteran of the AI and advanced computing industry, as its new president, CEO, and board member.
Investors reacted positively to the latest update, with BIRD shares up 52% on the day to a recent price of $5.99. Back in April, shares pumped from a price of $2.49 to as high as $24.31 before giving up most of the gains. Even so, BIRD remains up 46% year-to-date.
Carlsten arrives from DCAI, a GPU compute infrastructure company where she served as CEO and helped launch a sovereign AI supercomputer with Nvidia. Her résumé also includes stints at Google spinoff SandboxAQ and Amazon Web Services, where she worked on the launch of Amazon's quantum computing service. She holds chemistry and physics degrees from the University of Virginia and an engineering doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.
She replaces Joe Vernachio, who is stepping down from the company and its board. Independent director Lily Yan Hughes has been named board chair, while Annie Mitchell remains chief financial officer. Allbirds previously planned to rebrand as NewBird AI before settling on the final Smartbird name.
"Smartbird is entering the market at a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI infrastructure," said Carlsten, in a statement. "AI is rapidly becoming mission-critical for organizations across every industry, yet many organizations lack a practical path to deploy and operate the dedicated infrastructure these workloads require.”
“There is a clear opportunity to meet the growing need for enterprise-grade AI infrastructure that delivers control and performance without the capital and operational burden of hardware ownership,” she added. “With a differentiated strategy, significant capital, and the opportunity to build an exceptional team, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on one of the most significant infrastructure opportunities of the next decade.”
As part of the transition, the company expanded its convertible financing facility from $50 million to $100 million, giving Smartbird additional capital to build out what it describes as managed, dedicated AI computing clusters for enterprise customers. The company said it is in active talks with prospective customers and is designing its first cluster deployments.
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