Dive Brief:
- Allbirds Inc. officially changed its name to Smartbird Inc. and will now focus on artificial intelligence, the company announced on June 17. The company is listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and will continue to trade under the ticker symbol “BIRD.”
- Smartbird also named Nadia Carlsten as its president and CEO. She will also join the board of directors, per a company press release.
- In late March, American Exchange Group announced that it had agreed to buy the Allbirds brand and footwear assets. On June 17, the company announced the acquisition deal was in partnership with brand management and licensing platform WSG Brands.
Dive Insight:
Allbirds has transformed into Smartbird, an AI infrastructure provider, and has brought on a chief executive to fulfill its tech aspirations.
Carlsten replaces Joe Vernachio as chief executive, who resigned from the company and the board of directors. Vernachio will now lead the Sorel brand at Columbia Sportswear Company.
Before joining Smartbird, Carlsten served as the CEO of DCAI, an enterprise AI and GPU compute infrastructure provider, and vice president of product at the Google offshoot SandboxAQ. She also launched Amazon’s quantum computing service during her time at Amazon Web Services, according to the announcement.
Smartbird is already courting potential clients.
“Smartbird is entering the market at a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI infrastructure," Carlsten said in a press release. “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.”
Along with the name change, Smartbird increased its convertible financing facility from $50 million to $100 million, enabling the company to “execute its AI infrastructure strategy,” the company said.
The acquisition of Allbirds followed a challenging year for the brand. In 2025, the company’s net sales plunged nearly 20% from the year prior to $152.5 million, and net loss amounted to $77 million. The company stated that it had never turned a profit. In January, the brand said it would close all of its full-price stores in the U.S.
Months later, following the acquisition of its IP by American Exchange Group, Allbirds said it would “pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure, with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.”
