Allbirds rebrands as Smartbird, pivots to AI infrastructure
A San Francisco sneaker brand is now calling itself Smartbird, and its leader says the old shoe business is gone. The pivot comes as Allbirds sought $50 million to buy GPUs for AI compute.
A San Francisco brand built on merino wool sneakers is now pitching itself as an AI infrastructure company, with Nadia Carlsten saying the old Allbirds shoe business is gone. The transformation is striking because it leaves the public company shell in place while replacing the company’s original purpose with a bet on artificial intelligence compute.
Allbirds, founded in 2015 by Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger and listed on Nasdaq in 2021, first drew attention in April when the company said it was pivoting from sneakers to AI cloud infrastructure and its shares jumped more than 400% in early trading. Reuters later reported that Allbirds planned a $50 million convertible financing with an institutional investor and intended to use the proceeds to buy graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are the hardware backbone of many AI systems.
That financing and the stock reaction frame the move as more than a branding exercise. Carlsten, who has a PhD from UC Berkeley, said the company’s mission is now to bring more companies and organizations into AI, and she pointed to the advantages of staying public. A listed company can tap equity markets, recruit talent, and offer partners a ready-made corporate structure, even as it rebuilds its business from the ground up.
The shift also comes after a severe reset in the footwear business. SEC-linked 2025 filings show Allbirds reported net revenue of $152.5 million in fiscal 2025, down from $189.8 million in 2024, and a net loss of $77.3 million. Reporting tied to the annual filing also noted the closure of remaining full-price U.S. stores and raised going-concern concerns, signs that the company’s original consumer model had come under sustained pressure.
Allbirds’ own site still points back to its roots in shoes made from merino wool, eucalyptus tree fiber and sugar cane, a reminder of how far the company has moved from the sustainable-brand image that once defined it. In San Francisco, where companies regularly recast themselves to match the latest capital cycle, the Allbirds-to-Smartbird turn reads as both reinvention and desperation, a public test of whether a familiar local brand can survive by plugging itself into the city’s newest economic engine.
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