San Francisco-based Allbirds has officially completed its transformation from sustainable footwear retailer to artificial intelligence infrastructure firm. The Nasdaq-listed company, trading under ticker BIRD, announced the sale of its shoe and apparel business and a corporate rebranding to Smartbird.
Investors responded immediately to the strategic shift. BIRD shares jumped 52% to $5.99 following the announcement. The stock remains up 46% year-to-date as the market prices in the company's new direction in the high-demand AI compute sector.
Nadia Carlsten has been appointed president, CEO, and board member to lead the reinvented entity. Carlsten brings deep technical expertise from her tenure as CEO of GPU compute firm DCAI, where she helped launch a sovereign AI supercomputer with Nvidia. Her background also includes leadership roles at SandboxAQ and Amazon Web Services, specifically within quantum computing services.
Carlsten replaces outgoing CEO Joe Vernachio. Independent director Lily Yan Hughes assumes the role of board chair, while Annie Mitchell continues as chief financial officer. The company previously considered the name NewBird AI before finalizing the Smartbird identity.
To fund this infrastructure build-out, Smartbird has doubled its convertible financing facility to $100 million. This capital will support the development of managed, dedicated AI computing clusters for enterprise clients. The company states it is currently in active discussions with prospective customers and is designing its initial cluster deployments to address the critical shortage of enterprise-grade AI hardware.