Allbirds rebrands as Smartbird; stock jumps 45%

Allbirds completed its conversion to an artificial intelligence infrastructure provider on Wednesday, changing its corporate name to Smartbird and naming Nadia Carlsten president, chief executive officer and a member of the board. The company’s shares, which still trade under the ticker BIRD, rose more than 45% on the announcement.

Carlsten succeeds Joe Vernachio, who left both his executive position and the board. Independent director Lily Yan Hughes, who joined the board in October, was appointed chair. Annie Mitchell will remain chief financial officer.

Carlsten has held leadership roles in AI and cloud computing, including as chief executive of AI platform DCAI, product head for Amazon Web Services’ quantum-computing lab and work at SandboxAQ. She has advised the World Economic Forum on computing and artificial intelligence.

Smartbird plans to offer AI infrastructure as a managed service, allowing customers to access computing capacity without large upfront equipment purchases. The company is designing its first chip-cluster deployments and plans to build clusters to customer specifications rather than prebuilding large data centers.

Smartbird plans to target midmarket enterprises that face cost or security concerns when using major cloud providers. The company is in active talks with prospective customers and expects to operate cluster deployments for clients under the managed-service model.

Along with the rebranding, Smartbird expanded a previously announced senior secured convertible financing facility, increasing it to $100 million from $50 million through an amendment to a Securities Purchase Agreement signed in April. The additional funds can be used to issue senior secured convertible notes and had been earmarked for graphics processing units.

The company sold the Allbirds brand and footwear assets to American Exchange Group in March for $39 million and disclosed plans in April to shift its business away from footwear toward AI infrastructure. Allbirds’ market value had declined since its 2021 initial public offering, when it briefly reached an implied valuation near $4 billion.

Smartbird will enter a competitive market that includes providers such as CoreWeave and Nebius Group. Hughes called Carlsten’s appointment ‘thrilling’ and described her work as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘visionary.’ Carlsten commented, ‘AI is rapidly becoming mission-critical for organizations across every industry,’ and added that many organizations ‘lack a practical path to deploy and operate the dedicated infrastructure these workloads require.’