In brief – Allbirds, the footwear company, has sold its shoe business and rebranded as Smartbird, an AI infrastructure provider. – Nadia Carlsten, a veteran of AI compute infrastructure, has been named president and CEO. – The company boosted its convertible financing facility…
$100 million to fund its AI pivot. 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.