New York, June 17, 2026, 14:09 EDT
- Shares of Allbirds, now going by Smartbird, jumped roughly 50% Wednesday. The company appointed Nadia Carlsten as its new CEO and wrapped up its shift out of the shoe business.
- The company increased its convertible financing facility to $100 million, up from $50 million, to pay for AI infrastructure. That covers computing gear and systems for running artificial intelligence workloads.
- Nasdaq is open Wednesday. U.S. equity markets will be closed Friday for Juneteenth.
Smartbird jumped Wednesday after the company, which used to be Allbirds, said it wrapped up its move out of footwear, rebranded, and brought in ex-Amazon Web Services exec Nadia Carlsten to run its AI infrastructure push. BIRD shares traded up roughly 50% at $5.92 before 2 p.m. in New York. Volume topped 41 million, well above typical action for the small-cap stock.
This shift is important now because investors aren’t looking at Allbirds as just a weak sneaker name anymore. They’re trying to figure out what a small public shell is worth after selling off its top brand, saying it will pay out an asset-sale dividend, and tapping a convertible facility—a funding line that could become equity—to buy computing gear for clients that want AI muscle.
Smartbird named Carlsten as its new president, CEO and board member, taking over after Joe Vernachio quit the roles and left the board. The company also picked Lily Yan Hughes, who has been an independent director since October 2025, as board chair. Annie Mitchell stays on as CFO.
Smartbird said Carlsten previously worked at DCAI, SandboxAQ, and AWS. At Amazon, she helped launch its quantum-computing service, according to the company. Smartbird also increased its convertible financing facility to $100 million from $50 million and is talking with possible customers as it maps out its first cluster deployments. These clusters link chips to handle AI processing.
Carlsten called it a “pivotal moment” for Smartbird in the company’s statement. Hughes said the board was “thrilled” to hire her. That was what the market got Wednesday. Now they wait to see if orders pick up. GlobeNewswire
Allbirds set the stage for its pivot in April. The company said it landed a $50 million facility aimed at its push into AI compute infrastructure, and said it plans to move into GPU-as-a-Service and offer AI-native cloud. A GPU, or graphics processing unit, is a chip for AI and can run many calculations in parallel.
Allbirds is out of its former business. The company finished selling its footwear assets to Allbirds IP LLC, tied to American Exchange Group, for $40.7 million in cash, according to a June 15 filing summary. That includes a $2 million deposit now released. $3 million went into escrow for 60 days.
Allbirds told investors the next thing to track is its dividend date. The company said shareholders of record on June 25 will get an asset-sale dividend, paid within 60 days, though Allbirds didn’t give a dividend amount in the announcement.
Carlsten told Business Insider competition isn’t with shoe brands now. He said Smartbird doesn’t plan to take on big shared-cloud players like AWS, Azure, or CoreWeave. Instead, the company is aiming at customers who want single-tenant AI infrastructure—dedicated systems for each client, not shared ones.
But there are obvious risks. Smartbird is early in rollout, and its quick funding could shrink current holders if debt turns into equity, cutting their ownership. The company flagged risks around execution, hitting financial goals, the economy, and raising capital in its forward-looking statements.
Stocks gained in a normal Nasdaq session that ran from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern. Nasdaq will be closed Friday, June 19, for Juneteenth. That gives investors one more full U.S. equity day this week to trade on the name change, CEO handoff and the dividend record date.
