A San Francisco shoe company has pulled off one of the wildest corporate pivots in recent memory. Allbirds — once valued at nearly $4 billion after its 2021 Nasdaq debut — had cratered to a market cap of just $21 million by early 2025, with revenues shrinking and losses mounting. In March 2026, it sold its entire footwear brand to a fashion conglomerate for $39 million and rebranded as an AI infrastructure company called Smartbird.
The market reaction was immediate and extreme. Shares surged roughly 600 percent in a single session, fueled partly by short sellers being forced to buy back shares to limit losses, and partly by retail investor enthusiasm. By the following afternoon, the stock had given back 30 to 35 percent of those gains.
The company appointed Nadia Carlsten — a UC Berkeley engineering doctorate with experience at Amazon Web Services and Alphabet's SandboxAQ — as its new CEO. Carlsten has argued that operating as an existing public company — rather than building a new AI startup from zero — offers meaningful advantages, including access to capital markets and an easier path to attracting engineering talent. Smartbird has also secured a $100 million financing facility to purchase graphics processing units and lease them to AI businesses.
Skeptics, however, point out that Smartbird has yet to announce any confirmed customer contracts, hardware delivery timelines, or technology partnerships. Some have drawn comparisons to Long Island Iced Tea, which rebranded as Long Blockchain Corp in 2017 and was eventually delisted. Whether this is a genuine reinvention or just a trendy rebrand remains an open question.
