Birds of a feather pivot to GPUs: Allbirds walks away from wool, becomes Smartbird 🐦

The San Francisco-based company formerly known as Allbirds has completed the sale of its footwear and apparel business and rebranded as Smartbird, an artificial intelligence infrastructure firm trading on Nasdaq under the ticker BIRD. The company announced the change on Wednesday, naming Nadia Carlsten, former CEO of GPU compute infrastructure company DCAI, as its new president, CEO and board member. BIRD shares rose 52% on the day to a recent $5.99. In April, the stock moved from $2.49 to as high as $24.31 before giving back most of those gains, and remains up 46% year-to-date.

Carlsten's prior roles include work at Google spinoff SandboxAQ and Amazon Web Services, where she contributed to the launch of Amazon's quantum computing service. At DCAI, she helped launch a sovereign AI supercomputer with Nvidia. She holds chemistry and physics degrees from the University of Virginia and an engineering doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. She succeeds Joe Vernachio, who is stepping down from the company and its board. Independent director Lily Yan Hughes has been named board chair, and Annie Mitchell remains chief financial officer. The company had previously considered the name NewBird AI before settling on Smartbird.

"Smartbird is entering the market at a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI infrastructure," Carlsten said in a statement. "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." She added, "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. With a differentiated strategy, significant capital, and the opportunity to build an exceptional team, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on one of the most significant infrastructure opportunities of the next decade."

As part of the transition, Smartbird expanded its convertible financing facility from $50 million to $100 million to provide additional capital for its new operations. The first announcement of the footwear divestiture was made in April.