Allbirds Sold Its Shoe Business for $43 Million, Raised $100 Million, and Renamed Itself Smartbird. Its New CEO Has No Staff Yet.

Since Allbirds announced its AI pivot in April, the transformation has now fully closed. As of June 18, the footwear business is sold and the company is operating under the name Smartbird. Its new CEO, Nadia Carlsten, confirmed both milestones to TechCrunch and Business Insider in interviews published this week.

Carlsten joined the role with an engineering PhD, a background at AWS, and most recently a stint running the European compute firm DCAI. She has never owned a pair of Allbirds. "I'm more of a high heels person myself," she told Business Insider. "I'm blissfully unaware of all things Allbirds."

She is also, as of this week, running a company with no team. "We're going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and we're going to be getting an office," she told TechCrunch from Amsterdam. Her stated first priority is hiring a leadership team, starting with someone to head infrastructure operations.

How the money got here

Allbirds went public in 2021 at a valuation near $4 billion, according to Business Insider. By early 2025, that market cap had fallen below $20 million. In April, the company announced it would exit footwear entirely and pivot to AI infrastructure. The stock briefly surged 800% on the announcement, though Business Insider notes it has since given back much of that gain.

The company sold the shoe business for $43 million. It then raised an additional $100 million through the stock market, per both TechCrunch and Business Insider. That is the capital Carlsten now has to build Smartbird from scratch.

What Smartbird says it will do

The target market is organizations that want dedicated, privately managed AI compute, not shared public cloud. Carlsten told TechCrunch the ideal customers are in pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, or the public sector. In these industries, data sovereignty or regulatory requirements make handing sensitive workloads to Amazon or Microsoft complicated.

Her framing is that Smartbird is NOT competing with hyperscalers like AWS or neocloud providers like CoreWeave. The real competition, in her view, is companies' internal IT projects. Customers who might otherwise build their own private compute infrastructure would instead pay Smartbird to manage it.

She told TechCrunch she expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of 2026.

The skeptic's case is legitimate

Allbirds was a struggling consumer brand with no technology infrastructure background. Its pivot announcement came at the peak of AI investment mania and produced an 800% stock jump before the company had hired a single AI engineer. TechCrunch directly compared the move to the GameStop meme-stock playbook: troubled public company latches onto a hot trend, retail investors pile in, stock rises. That comparison warrants serious consideration by anyone evaluating whether this $143 million is being stewarded responsibly.

The market Carlsten is describing—private, sovereignty-focused managed AI compute—is real, but it is not unoccupied. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Equinix already offer single-tenant managed AI compute services, as TechCrunch noted. Carlsten acknowledged those competitors exist but argued Smartbird's differentiation lies in closer customer relationships and more bespoke deployments. She could not yet quantify the addressable market, telling TechCrunch it is "fairly nascent" because many companies are still piloting AI tools rather than committing to production infrastructure.

What the framing gap looks like across sources

Business Insider's coverage, published June 17, frames this as a dramatic but potentially visionary transformation, giving Carlsten extended space to articulate the strategy and leading with her credential set. TechCrunch's June 19 piece is more skeptical by design, using the meme-stock framing up front and naming the incumbents she will have to displace. The Uzbek outlet Zamin.uz and RocketNews both aggregated TechCrunch's reporting without adding independent sourcing. Neither of those secondary sources should be treated as independent confirmation of any claim not already established by TechCrunch or Business Insider.

What actually has to happen next

Carlsten has to hire a company before she can build one. That is the immediate variable. No leadership team means no infrastructure deals, no revenue, and no way to validate whether the sovereign-AI-compute thesis holds up in practice.

The deeper unresolved question: Allbirds shareholders approved a pivot based on a strategy deck, not a product. Carlsten inherits a listed public company with $143 million in capital, no staff, no office, no customers, and an ongoing obligation to report progress to public markets. The first real test of whether this is a business or a rebranding exercise will come when she announces her first infrastructure hire or her first paying customer, whichever arrives first.