After pivoting to become an AI company in April, former shoe brand Allbirds on June 17 announced another name change to become “Smartbird” and appointed a new president and CEO, Nadia Carlsten.
The company also said it increased the size of its convertible financing facility from $50 million to $100 million and appointed its independent director Lily Yan Hughes as board chair.
The company’s stock popped on Wednesday following these announcements, rising over 39 percent from $3.94 to $5.48 as over 47 million shares were exchanged.
“[Carlsten’s] groundbreaking work and visionary mindset will be instrumental in establishing a foothold in the market and building a scalable long-term solution for enterprise customers,” said Hughes. “The board selected Nadia because of the breadth of her experience and demonstrated success delivering breakthrough ideas and initiatives at scale.”
The company said Carlsten previously served as CEO of AI company DCAI, had tenures with Amazon Web Services and SandboxAQ, and launched a sovereign AI supercomputer in partnership with Nvidia. She replaces Joe Vernachio, who is resigning from the company and board.
Allbirds, now Smartbird, first announced its switch to AI on April 15, when it said it would receive $50 million in a convertible financing facility that would be used to buy GPUs, or AI chips, that it would lease under long-term agreements.
The company said it had a long-term vision of becoming a fully integrated GPU-as-a-service and AI-native cloud solutions provider. It originally said its new name would be “NewBird AI.”
The company said it will grow its AI compute cloud platform by expanding its compute and service offerings, deepening partnerships, and considering strategic mergers and acquisitions opportunities.
Its stock rose about 582 percent from $2.49 to $16.99 after the April 15 announcement, but fell almost 77 percent before Wednesday’s updates.
The drastic change in its business came just a couple of weeks after the San Francisco-based company sold its brand and certain assets for $39 million to American Exchange Group, which owns other consumer brands such as American Exchange, Aerosoles, Jonathan Alder, and White Mountain.
This sale price fell far short of the $4 billion valuation the company, founded in 2015, had in 2021 when it raised more than $300 million in its initial public offering. Its stock price was around $532 then.
Smartbird said on June 17 that it is in active discussions with prospective customers and is designing its first cluster deployments.
“Many organizations lack a practical path to deploy and operate the dedicated infrastructure these [AI] workloads require,” Carlsten said in the announcement. “There is a clear opportunity to meet the growing need for enterprise-grade AI infrastructure that delivers control and performance without the capital and operational burden of hardware ownership.”
