Allbirds rebrands as Smartbird, stock jumps after AI pivot

Allbirds completed the sale of its shoe and apparel business on Wednesday, rebranded as Smartbird and named Nadia Carlsten president and chief executive officer. The San Francisco company, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker BIRD, saw its shares climb 52% to $5.99.

The company announced it has finished the previously disclosed divestiture of its Allbirds consumer business and will operate as an artificial intelligence infrastructure provider. Smartbird expanded its convertible financing facility to $100 million from $50 million to fund the transition and to build managed, dedicated AI computing clusters for enterprise customers.

The company is in active talks with prospective clients and is designing its first cluster deployments.

Carlsten joins Smartbird from DCAI, where she served as CEO and helped launch a sovereign AI supercomputer in partnership with Nvidia. Her background includes roles at SandboxAQ and Amazon Web Services, where she worked on the launch of Amazon’s quantum computing service. She holds degrees in chemistry and physics from the University of Virginia and an engineering doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

Joe Vernachio will step down from the company and its board. Independent director Lily Yan Hughes was named board chair, and Annie Mitchell remains chief financial officer.

The stock’s jump followed earlier volatility this year. BIRD briefly traded as high as $24.31 after a surge from $2.49 in April. The share price is up about 46% year to date.

“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,” Carlsten wrote in a statement. “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.”

The company considered the name NewBird AI before settling on Smartbird. Management expects the new capital and leadership to support the buildout of infrastructure offerings as the business shifts from consumer footwear and apparel to enterprise AI services.