Allbirds, the shoe company that pivoted to artificial intelligence in April 2026, has rebranded as Smartbird and appointed Nadia Carlsten as its first CEO to lead the newly formed AI business — with no employees yet hired and an office still to be secured.
Carlsten, a former AWS executive with an engineering PhD, most recently led European compute company DCAI before starting in the Smartbird role. She told TechCrunch she is based in Amsterdam and is currently focused on assembling a leadership team, including someone to head infrastructure operations.
The transition follows a rapid corporate overhaul: Allbirds sold its shoe business for $43 million and raised an additional $100 million from the stock market. The shoe business officially closed the day Carlsten began her role. She will receive a $700,000 annual salary and stock valued at approximately $9 million.
Smartbird’s stated plan is to operate as an AI infrastructure provider, targeting companies that require direct control over their servers — typically for data sovereignty or business-model reasons — rather than relying on public cloud services. Carlsten described potential customers as being in pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, and the public sector, citing her experience working with firms like Novo Nordisk at DCAI.
Carlsten said Smartbird is not competing with hyperscalers or neoclouds, but with companies’ internal IT projects. Established players such as Hewlett Packard and Equinix already offer comparable single-tenant managed AI compute services. Carlsten expects to have compute clusters deployed for several customers by the end of 2026.
The rebrand also ended Allbirds’ public benefit corporation status, which had previously enshrined the shoe company’s sustainability commitments — a change that suggests PBC charters offer limited long-term protection when a company’s direction shifts fundamentally.
“It wasn’t, ‘Let’s just do AI, because it’s AI, and it’s hot,'” Carlsten told TechCrunch. “It was really about, do we have a chance to build a business over time that is going to find this niche in the market and be able to grow over time?”
Source: TechCrunch