Allbirds, the direct-to-consumer sneaker brand that defined Silicon Valley casualness, announced it was abandoning shoes for AI. That actually happened—and it's working so far.
The shoe company's reinvention reads like a Silicon Valley fever dream made real. According to TechCrunch, Allbirds sold off its entire footwear business for $43 million, then raised another $100 million from stock market investors. Now it's called Smartbird, and it's an AI infrastructure play.
Nadia Carlsten, a former AWS executive with a PhD in engineering, became CEO yesterday. She has a vision, a massive budget, and no team.
"We're going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and we're going to be getting an office," Carlsten told TechCrunch from Amsterdam. The shoe business officially closed yesterday, so she's starting from scratch.
Smartbird targets AI infrastructure for companies that need data sovereignty—pharma giants, energy firms, financial institutions, and governments. Carlsten positions them not as competitors to cloud hyperscalers, but as an alternative to companies building expensive, bespoke internal AI systems.
The market is niche. Carlsten admitted she can't estimate its size yet, and established players like Hewlett Packard and Equinix already operate there. Still, she is confident enough to promise deployed compute clusters for "several customers" by year's end.
It's a startup with a sole founder and a very large seed round. What happens next is the $100 million question.
