Allbirds Sells Shoe Business for $43 Million, Raises $100 Million, and Renames to Smartbird to Enter AI Infrastructure

Allbirds sold its shoe business for $43 million, raised another $100 million from the stock market, and changed its name to Smartbird after pivoting to AI in April. The shoe business closed yesterday. Nadia Carlsten began as Smartbird’s CEO yesterday.

A former AWS executive with an engineering PhD, she most recently led the European compute company DCAI. She spoke to TechCrunch from Amsterdam. “We’re going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and we’re going to be getting an office,” Carlsten said.

Smartbird aims to be an AI infrastructure provider focused on direct-control servers. Carlsten said the company targets customers that need data sovereignty for political or business-model reasons rather than public-cloud scalability. Carlsten could not yet estimate the size of the market for direct-control AI servers.

She said many companies are still piloting AI tools and that the segment remains nascent. At DCAI, Carlsten worked with Novo Nordisk and other European firms in pharmaceutical, energy, financial, and public sectors. She said those clients value control over the infrastructure stack and agility over large GPU counts.

Hewlett Packard and Equinix already offer single-tenant managed AI compute services. Carlsten said Smartbird will compete mainly with internal company projects rather than hyperscalers or neoclouds. Carlsten expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of the year.

She noted that potential customers typically need clusters in the range of hundreds to thousands of chips. General Compute announced a $300 billion chip order when it came out of stealth last month. Carlsten said Smartbird does not require comparable commitments because its focus is specialized workflows rather than 24-hour optimization for lowest price.