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Remember Allbirds, the comfy wool sneakers every tech bro wore to the office around 2019? They’re All-Gone. The company has officially renamed itself Smartbird, sold off the entire Allbirds shoe brand and reinvented itself as an AI company, according to Bloomberg.
The new Smartbird plans to sell “AI infrastructure as a service,” which essentially means renting out the computing power companies need to run AI without buying their own hardware. To run it, the company hired Nadia Carlsten, who previously led Amazon Web Services’ quantum computing center and ran Denmark’s first AI supercomputer. The old CEO is out, the company doubled its financing to $100 million, and the stock jumped nearly 40% on the news.
If this feels familiar, it should. Struggling companies have been latching onto buzzy trends forever. Dot-com companies did it. Crypto companies did it. In February, a tiny karaoke company’s stock soared the moment it mentioned AI trucking. Smartbird is just the latest to discover that two letters can change everything.