Allbirds announced a switch from shoes to AI and its stock jumped 600 percent

Allbirds had a hit a decade ago with its Wool Runner shoes, but after a $4 billion IPO in 2021, the business never turned a profit, and sales dropped nearly 50 percent between 2022 and 2025. The company recently announced it would sell off its name and assets for $39 million to American Exchange after closing the remaining stores. That shell listing, however, still has some use as the Financial Times points out, and now CEO Joe Vernachio has announced a plan to raise $50 million from an unnamed investor, which will turn NewBird AI into “a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.”

What does that have to do with anything Allbirds has ever done, and how much AI compute can $50 million provide to its customers that trillion- and billion-dollar competitors can’t? I don’t know, but this looks a lot like the kind of zombie brand pivot we saw in the SPAC-happy days of 2021, when Radio Shack suddenly turned into a cryptocurrency company.

We asked Wharton professor Gad Allon about the news, and he said, “Calling this a ‘pivot’ gives Allbirds too much credit.”

“A pivot implies the company is redeploying some capability, whether technology, talent, or distribution, into a new market. Allbirds has none of that in AI. What they do have is a public listing, and in this market, that turns out to be the only asset that matters. They’re not pivoting to AI. They’re using their status as a listed company to raise money against the flavor of the month… There’s an old Wall Street joke that when the shoe shine boy starts giving you stock tips, it’s time to sell. We may have reached the updated version: when the shoe company starts pitching itself as an AI play, the bubble is telling you something.”

Chardan Capital is listed in its press release as a placement agent, and in another recent deal, it served as the “exclusive M&A” adviser on a merger between the maker of the Evie smart ring, Movano, and an AI cloud computing company, Corvex. The newly combined company is still publicly listed under the “MOVE” ticker, but there’s no mention of health tech or future smart rings in its press release.

Following the NewBird AI news, the price of its stock (BIRD) spiked as high as $24.31, a 721 percent increase after opening the day at $6.82, and continues to hover at around $20 or so as of this writing.

Update, April 15th: Added comment from Gad Allon.