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The CEO of Allbirds’ new AI biz has a plan, but no team
Allbirds, the shoe brand known for defining "Silicon Valley style," pivoted to AI in April, selling its shoe business for $43 million and raising $100 million from the stock market. The company is now called Smartbird, and Nadia Carlsten became CEO on the day of the announcement. Carlsten, a former AWS executive with an engineering PhD, previously led European compute company DCAI. Smartbird aims to be an AI infrastructure provider, focusing on customers who need direct control over servers for political or business-model reasons, prioritizing data sovereignty over public cloud scalability. Carlsten sees the market as nascent, with potential clients in pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, and the public sector. She expects to deploy compute clusters for several customers by year-end, targeting needs of hundreds to thousands of chips, not massive scales. The company is not competing with hyperscalers or neoclouds on price but with internal company projects. Established competitors include Hewlett Packard and Equinix. During the transition, Allbirds lost its public benefit corporation (PBC) status, which had enshrined sustainability commitments. Carlsten, who received a $700,000 annual salary and $9 million in stock, insists the move was strategic, not a mere trend-chase. She plans to recruit a new leadership team and secure an office in Amsterdam. Despite the hype around AI infrastructure, Smartbird aims to carve out a niche with controlled, agile clusters rather than massive scale.