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Allbirds Renames Itself Smartbird, Shifts From Shoes to AI Infrastructure

June 17, 2026 at 10:13 EDT

Infra & Chips
Funding & M&A
Sales & Business

Allbirds, Inc., the maker of sustainable wool sneakers, said on June 17, 2026, that it has officially changed its name to Smartbird, Inc., fully exiting footwear to pivot to AI infrastructure. Its NASDAQ ticker remains "BIRD" with no change to its CUSIP. The company named Nadia Carlsten (PhD), a former Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive specializing in AI and quantum computing, as its new CEO, with former CEO Joe Vernachio stepping down and Lily Yan Hughes becoming Board Chair.

June 17, 2026 · Smartbird, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIRD)

From Wool Sneakers to GPU Clusters: Allbirds Becomes Smartbird

The footwear brand once valued above $4 billion sold its shoe business and re-emerged as an AI compute infrastructure provider — a textbook public-shell pivot into the GPUaaS boom.

$39M

Shoe brand & assets sold to American Exchange Group

2×

Financing facility expanded $50M → $100M

$4B+

Peak valuation as a sneaker brand (founded 2015)

Financing facility, doubled

$50M

Before

$100M

After (June 17)

The pivot, at a glance

Was

Allbirds, Inc.

Sustainable merino-wool sneakers

→

Now

Smartbird, Inc.

Enterprise AI infrastructure — GPU-as-a-Service & clusters

New President & CEO

Nadia Carlsten

ex-AWS, SandboxAQ, DCAI

Ticker

BIRD (unchanged)

The case for

CEO brings deep AI-infrastructure pedigree
Managed-service model: procure, deploy, operate, refresh
Rides the 2025–26 GPUaaS / neocloud wave

The skepticism

Questions of "AI washing" via a public shell
First cluster still only in the design stage
Pricing, timing & specs undisclosed — almost no real usage to evaluate

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