Allbirds, the sustainable footwear company that went public at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021, has officially renamed itself Smartbird and appointed a new chief executive to lead its pivot into AI compute. Shares surged more than 50% on Wednesday morning before pulling back.
The rebrand completes a transformation first announced in April, when the company said it would sell its shoe business for $39 million and become a GPU cloud provider called NewBird AI. That announcement sent the stock up 582% in a single session, though it gave back most of those gains within weeks.
New name, new boss, no shoes
Smartbird has appointed Nadia Carlsten as president and CEO. Carlsten previously ran DCAI, the Danish Centre for AI Innovation, where she launched Denmark’s first AI supercomputer, Gefion, in partnership with Nvidia.
Before DCAI, she spent three years at Amazon Web Services, where she helped launch Amazon’s quantum computing service. She also worked at Google spinoff SandboxAQ and holds an engineering doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.
