The CEO of Allbirds’ new AI biz has a plan, but no employees

Allbirds pivoted to AI in April, sold its shoe business for $43 million, raised another $100 million from the market and is now called Smartbird. Nadia Carlsten, a former AWS executive with an engineering PhD who most recently led the European compute company DCAI, began yesterday as Smartbird’s CEO.

“We’re going to be recruiting a brand new team for the AI business, and we’re going to be getting an office,” she said from Amsterdam. “The shoe business has officially closed as of yesterday, so that’s all done…The first task that I’m tackling right now is rounding up the leadership team, looking for somebody to lead infrastructure operations, for example.” Smartbird plans to be an AI infrastructure provider focused on deployments where customers need direct control over the servers running their models for political or business-model reasons and value data sovereignty over public-cloud scale.

Carlsten said the market is fairly nascent and that many companies are still piloting AI tools.

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