source: techcrunch ai: the ceo of allbirds’ new ai biz has a plan, but no employees
level: business
allbirds completed its pivot to ai, selling its shoe business for $43 million and raising $100 million from the stock market. the company is now called smartbird and aims to provide ai infrastructure. nadia carlsten, a former aws executive with an engineering phd, started as ceo yesterday. she is based in amsterdam and her first task is hiring a leadership team, including someone to run infrastructure operations. the shoe business officially closed, leaving smartbird as a startup with a large seed round and no employees.
smartbird will offer managed ai compute for companies that need direct control over servers, often for data sovereignty or business-model reasons. carlsten sees the target market as firms in pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, and the public sector that run bespoke models. she argues smartbird competes with internal company projects rather than hyperscalers or neoclouds. established players like hewlett packard and equinix already offer similar single-tenant services. carlsten expects to deploy compute clusters for several customers by year-end, focusing on clusters of hundreds to thousands of chips rather than massive scale.
carlsten says the pivot was deliberate, not just chasing a trend. she will earn a $700,000 salary and received $9 million in stock. the company dropped its public benefit corporation status, which had underscored sustainability commitments. carlsten insists the board is committed to the ai strategy long-term. demand for ai infrastructure is high, but smartbird will not compete on price, instead emphasizing agility and control. the market for sovereign ai compute is nascent, and carlsten believes there is room to grow by serving specialized needs.
why it matters: smartbird's focus on data-sovereign ai infrastructure highlights a growing niche for enterprises that cannot use public clouds, relevant for ai practitioners managing compliance-sensitive deployments.
source: techcrunch ai: the ceo of allbirds’ new ai biz has a plan, but no employees