Allbirds Pivots to AI, Becomes Smartbird with New CEO and $100M Funding
Key Takeaways
- ▸Allbirds sold its shoe business for $43 million and raised $100 million to fund the new AI infrastructure venture, now called Smartbird
- ▸New CEO Nadia Carlsten is building a brand-new team focused on serving regulated industries with data-sovereignty requirements
- ▸Smartbird targets a different market than hyperscalers and cloud-native AI providers—companies needing direct infrastructure control rather than maximum scale
Summary
Allbirds, the direct-to-consumer shoe company, has officially transformed into Smartbird, an AI infrastructure startup, after selling its footwear business for $43 million and raising $100 million in new funding. The company appointed Nadia Carlsten, a former AWS executive with a PhD in engineering and recent CEO of European compute company DCAI, to lead the newly formed business.
Smartbird will focus on providing AI infrastructure for enterprises prioritizing data sovereignty and direct control over their AI model deployments. Rather than competing with hyperscalers like AWS or cloud-native startups, Carlsten's target customers are regulated industries—pharmaceuticals, finance, energy, and public sector organizations—that need to keep their data and compute infrastructure under tight control and avoid dependency on large cloud providers.
Carlsten is currently assembling Smartbird's leadership team from scratch, with a mandate to have compute clusters operational for several customers by year-end. The company expects its target market to require hundreds to thousands of GPUs rather than the massive scale pursued by rivals, prioritizing control and agility over raw compute volume.
- The company expects its first customer deployments by year-end, with infrastructure designed for hundreds to thousands of GPUs rather than massive scale
