The company formerly known for its Allbirds sneakers has taken another step in its pivot toward becoming an artificial-intelligence company with a new name and CEO.
On Wednesday, Allbirds formally completed the sale of its sneaker brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group and officially changed its legal name to Smartbird. The stock will continue to trade under the original Allbirds ticker symbol.
Smartbird also welcomed new leadership. Nadia Carlsten, an industry veteran in advanced computing, is the new president and CEO of the company. She succeeds Joe Vernachio, who was appointed in 2024 to help orchestrate a turnaround for the struggling sneaker brand. Vernachio is resigning from the company and its board of directors.
The sneaker brand has fallen a long way since its 2021 public listing, when it debuted with a $2.2 billion valuation. The company’s market capitalization hit an all-time high of $4.1 billion after its first day of trading. However, sales declined significantly in the following years, while costs related to bricks-and-mortar stores rose.
The company announced its transition to an AI infrastructure provider, as well as a $50 million convertible financing facility, in April. The dramatic pivot sent shares surging nearly 600%, leading many to question if this was a sign of an AI bubble. “I’m starting to see some echoes of the 1990s tech bubble,” Morningstar’s chief U.S. market strategist Dave Sekera wrote in an April note. “What does a shoe company know about being a data center?”
The initial enthusiasm about Smartbird’s AI pivot has largely faded: The stock closed at $3.94 on Tuesday, down 77% since the April 15 announcement. But Smartbird’s business transformation is in motion, with the company sharing in the press release that “the company is in active discussions with prospective customers across its target verticals and is currently designing its first cluster deployments.”
The company aims to manage the entire AI infrastructure lifecycle, from procuring and refreshing graphics processing units to handling server deployment and maintenance.
Unlike other neoclouds like CoreWeave that have made a name for themselves via high-profile contracts with Big Tech customers, Smartbird will focus on serving the AI infrastructure needs of middle-market companies, typically defined as businesses that do between $10 million and $1 billion in annual revenue.
“AI is rapidly becoming mission-critical for organizations across every industry, yet many middle-market companies lack a practical path to deploy and operate the dedicated infrastructure these workloads require,” Carlsten said in the press release. “There is a growing need for enterprise-grade AI infrastructure that delivers the control and performance of ownership without the capital and operational burden.”
