• Allbirds has been rebranded as Smartbird. Instead of selling shoes, it's an AI infrastructure provider.
• Nadia Carlsten, the new CEO, spoke exclusively to Business Insider about her plans.
• She wants to build custom, single-tenant AI infrastructure for mid-market enterprises.

A few years ago, Allbirds was Silicon Valley's favorite sneaker company. Now it's betting its future on AI infrastructure.

After selling off its footwear business and shedding most of its workforce, the company formerly known for its eco-friendly wool sneakers has reinvented itself as Smartbird, an AI infrastructure provider led by a CEO who has never worn its signature shoes.

The transformation is one of the most dramatic pivots of the AI boom and a test of whether a struggling public consumer company can transition into an AI company.

"I'm more of a high heels person myself," Nadia Carlsten told Business Insider in an exclusive interview. "I'm blissfully unaware of all things Allbirds."

For those unaware, Allbirds launched in 2015 and quickly became one of tech's hottest consumer brands, with its sneakers as much a part of the Silicon Valley uniform as hoodies and Patagonia vests.

After going public in 2021, Allbirds was worth nearly $4 billion. But the brand's cool factor faded almost as quickly as it arrived. By early 2025, Allbirds' market value had fallen below $20 million.

Then, in April, the company announced an only-in-2026 pivot: It would no longer sell shoes and instead become an AI infrastructure provider, going head-to-head with the likes of Amazon, CoreWeave, and Crusoe.

Some ridiculed the move as "bizarre," or even "ridiculous and concerning." Wall Street was more enthusiastic, with the stock briefly soaring 800% on the news, though it has since lost much of its gains.

The transformation became official on Wednesday as the company said that it has completed the sale of the Allbirds brand and footwear assets, changed its legal name to Smartbird, and appointed Carlsten as president and CEO. She replaces Joe Vernachio, who is resigning from the company and the board of directors.

Carlsten was previously CEO of the Danish Centre for AI Innovation. She also managed product portfolios at SandboxAQ and launched the quantum computing service at Amazon Web Services.

With nearly the entire company's staff gone, Carlsten is starting from scratch, except for the same BIRD ticker symbol that trades on the NASDAQ.

Business Insider spoke with Carlsten about her plans. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

BI: Did you ever imagine you would be working at Allbirds, and it would not be a shoe company, but an AI infrastructure play?

Carlsten: I've been around the block in Silicon Valley. It's not that unusual. Slack started as a game. Twitter started as a podcast. SpaceX started as a rocket company and is now doing AI infrastructure. So there's precedent for some of this.

Everybody's trying to be in the AI infrastructure space. This is probably not the most typical way to get into it, but we have a really good plan and strategy.

In a few months, people won't even remember the shoes.

BI: What does the company you're taking over look like at this stage?

Carlsten: The important thing to remember is that the shoe business has been sold, so anybody who was dedicated to the retail business is no longer part of the company. My first task is to hire the team. This is a brand-new company with brand-new people.

BI: Why not just start a new company?

Carlsten: In many ways, it is like a startup. I'm going to be growing a team, developing a new business model, approaching customers, and growing a pipeline of customers.

There are also some advantages to being a public company. One of them is access to capital. We have an easier time as we're looking at acquisitions and partnering with others in the industry. The liquidity makes it a lot easier to recruit.

In AI, speed is key. So why would you want to do things more slowly if you can do it faster?

BI: You're also now running a public company from day one, which brings a lot of scrutiny. Are you worried about that?

Carlsten: AI fluctuates, whether it's public or private. This is a business that is never static. AI is moving incredibly fast.

Customers are demanding things very differently than they were just a couple of months ago. So I don't think that makes much of a difference in how we will build the business.

BI: What exactly is Smartbird going to do?

Carlsten: We are an AI infrastructure company, and what makes us different is that we are focusing on the mid-market, such as enterprises that are in the pharma space or financial services space, and also countries that are interested in sovereign AI or having regional AI infrastructure accessible to them.

All of these players are doing more AI. They have more needs for persistent AI infrastructure, but at the same time, for whatever reason, they cannot use or won't use the public clouds. They are very interested in making sure their proprietary data does not enter a shared multi-tenant infrastructure system.

Right now, their choices are either shared infrastructure or building their own. And most of the people that I talk to in this space want to do more AI, but that doesn't mean that they want to build that AI infrastructure. Right now, they're doing it because they have to.

BI: You're going up against Amazon, Google, CoreWeave, and a lot of other established players. How do you plan to compete?

Carlsten: We're not competing head-on with hyperscalers like AWS or Azure or even large neoclouds like CoreWeave. Those guys are very good at building massive-scale shared infrastructure, which is the opposite of what we want to be doing.

We will focus on customers who need AI infrastructure at a smaller scale. Usually, they want single-tenant infrastructure, something that looks like a GPU cluster that they own and can fully control without having the disadvantages of managing the stack themselves.

BI: Where are you getting the GPUs from?

Carlsten: We'll be sourcing from multiple vendors. One of the things we'll be offering customers is the flexibility to build something specifically for their requirements.

BI: Are you going to buy the infrastructure or lease it?

Carlsten: We will purchase the infrastructure and build it out on behalf of the customer. We're not building ahead of demand. We are building something for specific customers.

We can be a lot more agile than the bigger players.

• The banker says he has received multiple offers from employees since posting the deal this week.
• The 13-acre Mill Valley estate features sweeping views of San Francisco, an infinity-edge pool, and a spa.
• The offer comes as Anthropic's valuation on secondary markets reached $1 trillion, and shares are scarce.

A tech banker really, really wants Anthropic shares.

The hunt for shares in Anthropic has become so frenzied in recent weeks that Storm Duncan is offering up his $4.8 million Marin County estate in exchange for stock.

"If you're going fishing, you've got to put a worm on the hook," said Storm Duncan, the founder and managing partner of Ignatious, a tech boutique investment bank, in an interview with Business Insider. "What's my other option? Not being in it?"

The offer comes as Anthropic's valuation on secondary markets soared to $1 trillion, driven by investors who have been wowed by its torrid revenue growth and momentum around its AI-powered coding assistant, Claude Code, Business Insider reported this week.

Duncan, who lives primarily in Jackson Hole, Wyo., also owns other properties, but he decided to list this one because he thought it would be especially attractive to Anthropic employees.

Duncan's 13-acre, fully furnished Mill Valley estate features sweeping views of San Francisco, an infinity-edge pool, and a spa.

"It's a 20-minute commute to the Anthropic offices in the city," he said. "No one from Anthropic probably wants my Miami or Jackson Hole place."

By offering the property, Duncan hopes to get on the radar of employees who have legitimate shares to sell and own a goldmine of Anthropic stock they can't sell until after the company goes public.

Duncan says he has received multiple offers since posting the deal this week. "Some of them are [Anthropic] employees, and some of them just happen to have invested early," he said. "I believe they're serious, but it's a complex transaction."

"There's probably a decent number of people who are sitting in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco even though they're earning $400,000 a year and are worth a $100 million," he said. "But they can't access that because their stock is so illiquid, so this gives them an opportunity to diversify."

It's not the first time there's been an unconventional way to secure shares in pre-IPO tech companies. In 2005, artist David Choe chose Facebook stock over $60,000 in cash to paint murals at Facebook's first office. That choice led to an estimated windfall of about $200 million once Facebook went public in 2012. In the dot-com era, some real estate owners asked startups for company stock in exchange for leasing space in San Francisco.

Some on X have dismissed Duncan's offer as a publicity stunt or a sure sign of the top of a bubble. Others have made cracks about the only thing being more precious than Anthropic shares is Bay Area real estate.

Duncan insists the offer is real and he is not seeking attention. As for why he does not simply buy shares in the company, he says a small investor like him would never be able to secure stock directly.

"Anthropic can't spend time with people like me," Duncan said. "They're looking for people who can write $100 million in a single check." (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

The alternative is to buy shares from early employees or investors on secondary markets, but Duncan says those deals are often increasingly dubious.

He said the scarcity of shares on the secondary market has made sellers offer deals that can be rife with high fees and opaque ownership structures.

Duncan already owns shares in Anthropic that he acquired in its 2024 funding round, when it was much easier to obtain shares. He says he was recently convinced he wanted to double down after being wowed by the results of his firm's implementation of Claude Code.

"It's probably going to triple our throughput and reduce our costs by 50%," he said. "As I started to implement the platform at my own firm, I said I would like to have more exposure to this."

• Buyers have been willing to pay a premium of up to 40% to buy Anduril shares.
• The steep markup reflects a two-tiered class for accessing stock in the hottest startups.
• Data from Caplight highlights a supply imbalance, with buyer demand surging to 97% while sellers' demand is at 3%.

Anduril hasn't even finalized its next funding round, and investors are already eager to pay up like it's a sold-out concert. As marquee venture firms Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz line up to back the defense tech startup at a reported $60 billion valuation, others shut out of the deal are scrambling to buy shares on secondary markets at steep premiums.

"Demand is so significant that buyers who have FOMO are willing to pay huge premiums for access," said Kelly Rodriques, CEO of Forge Global, a private marketplace exchange for shares of private companies like Anduril. "The company hates when this happens, but it happens."

The frenzy around investing in Anduril reflects the growing divide in private markets: access to the hottest startups is split between the VC firms that get in at a certain price and everyone else, forced to pay up on the sidelines. Anthropic has also seen a premium for secondary shares, though not as significant, said Rodriques.

Those investors shut out of the company's fundraising round are forced to buy via secondary markets, with existing stock in the company being sold by current or former employees or early investors. The rush for shares reminds Rodriques of buying tickets to see Taylor Swift on Stubhub when her concert sells out in minutes.

"It's scalping," he said.

Interested buyers have been willing to pay a premium of up to 40% above the $60 billion valuation to buy Anduril shares, according to Rodriques and Greg Martin, managing director and co-founder at Rainmaker Securities, another private marketplace exchange. The deals are not yet finalized because a willing seller and the company's blessing are still required.

"The magnitude of the premium is unusual," said Martin. "Usually we see premiums in the 5% to 15% range."

Anduril declined to comment for this story. Cofounders Palmer Luckey and Matt Grimm have loudly railed against unauthorized sales of the company's shares, publicly calling out some firms as "frauds."

"If I were an investor looking at this 'opportunity,' I'd run for the hills," Grimm posted in December. "Secondary markets are rife with fraud and bad actors, and it pains me to see these bottom feeders profiting off Anduril's growth while fleecing retail investors through unreasonable or opaque fee structures."

The founders have tightly controlled Andruil's stock, requiring would-be sellers to offer the company a first right of refusal to buy back those shares or assign the sale to a buyer of Andruil's choosing. The limited supply is a major reason shares have been among the hardest to obtain for any startup since last year, driving investor "frenzy."

Data from Caplight highlights a massive supply imbalance in the secondary market for Anduril stock, with buyer demand surging to 97% of total volume compared to just 3% from willing sellers—a stark shift from a 69-to-31 split in February.

If demand for Anduril shares is so high, the obvious question is: Why doesn't the company raise its share price to avoid leaving money on the table?

To explain, Rodriques went back to the analogy of a Taylor Swift concert or Nike shoes. Just because some people are willing to pay more does not mean the company wants to set its prices so high.

"It's the same reason Nike doesn't sell sneakers for $2000 if there's a secondary market for a hard-to-get sneaker," Rodriques said. "It's not in their best interest to charge their customers $2000 for a pair of shoes."

Similarly, Anduril would prefer to raise capital from its chosen VCs.

"The company has gotten to a $60 billion valuation by doing a very detailed and thorough job of working with some of the best investors in the world," he said.

• Eight salespeople from ServiceNow have jumped ship to rival startup Serval in recent months.
• Two of the salespeople cited fears about AI as their reason for leaving ServiceNow.
• ServiceNow's stock has tumbled 40% in the last six months in the so-called SaaS-pocalypse.

Eight salespeople from ServiceNow and its newly acquired subsidiary, Moveworks, have jumped ship to rival startup Serval in recent months, Business Insider has learned.

ServiceNow is a cloud computing software company whose stock has tumbled 40% in the last six months in the so-called SaaS-pocalypse, as investors fear AI could decimate the profit margins of software giants. In an effort to stay one step ahead in the AI race, ServiceNow closed an all-cash $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks in December to create an "AI-native front door."

The same month, Serval closed a $75 million Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the rapidly growing AI-powered IT support startup at $1 billion. Sequoia was also an early investor in ServiceNow.

Eight employees represent a fraction of ServiceNow's 29,000-person workforce. Still, the exodus shows how difficult it can be for tech companies with falling valuations to retain talent when buzzy, well-funded AI companies come calling. A ServiceNow spokesman declined to comment.

The highest-level departure is Brad Patterson, who had been a ServiceNow sales VP for nearly two years.

"AI is really making serious moves," Patterson said in an interview. "In a similar way, market sentiment is responding; I think people are responding in the same way."

Every incumbent tech company is facing a similar talent drain, according to Jules Levy, ServiceNow's former head of enterprise generative & enterprise AI, who is also among those joining Serval.

"I don't think this is unique to ServiceNow," he said in an interview. "Many folks within those incumbents are looking to jump to AI-native platforms that will be able to move really fast and take advantage of this technological wave."

"I think everyone's trying to figure out what comes next," he added.

Serval is not specifically targeting ServiceNow employees, but when one employee leaves, it can have a ripple effect, according to Tatiana Birgisson, Serval's chief operating officer.

"If you hire really good people, other really good people in their network want to follow them," she said, citing Chris Comes, who became a Serval VP of Sales in November after more than three years at MoveWorks. "Multiple people got excited about seeing the announcement of his going to Servo."

Startups have usually offered less job security and lower cash compensation than public tech companies, but Birgisson says tech downsizing has made it easier to recruit candidates.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut roughly 40% of his workforce in February, citing the rise of AI. Meta could reportedly lay off a fifth of its staff amid skyrocketing AI costs.

"Big Tech no longer feels as safe as it once did," Birgisson said. "We are starting to see more candidates who, 5-10 years ago, would not have considered working at a startup, but are now more open to it because there isn't the clear divide between 'secure' and 'risky' jobs."