Allbirds is moving on to AI after selling its shoe brand and other assets for $39 million last month. Since the shoe brand “Allbirds” was sold, the company will also have a new name. The company stated on Wednesday through its investor relations website that NewBird AI is now live. It is a “fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service and AI-native cloud solutions provider.”
The new name for the AI company came with news of a $50 million investment from an institutional investor that was not named. The investment came in the form of a flexible financing facility.
It’s actually pretty funny that Allbirds is changing its focus to AI. This isn’t because companies often change their direction, but because this change is so big. The company that made the shoes that tech people in Silicon
This former Allbirds turned NewBird probably wants something different to happen.
The business says that the financing and sale of the assets still need to be approved by the stockholders. A meeting is set for May 18 to do this. People who own stock will get a reward in the third quarter if the sale goes through. Allbirds customers will still be able to buy products from American Exchange Group, which bought the Allbirds name and assets.
At the same time, NewBird AI plans to use the new money to buy GPU assets that it will then sell to companies that need AI computing power. Over time, the business wants to offer more services by forming relationships and maybe even strategically merging with other businesses if the chance comes up.
Allbirds, the wool trainer brand that became a sort of unofficial uniform for the tech elite, has agreed to sell all of its assets and intellectual property to American Exchange Group for $39 million. This is less than a tenth of the $348 million it raised in its IPO in 2021 and much less than the more than $4 billion it was worth on its first day of trading.
The deal still needs to be approved by shareholders. It’s expected to close in the second quarter, and investors will get their money sometime in the third quarter. After the market closed, shares went up 36% on the news. The stock finished on Monday at $2.98, giving the company a market value of $24.5 million. This means that the $39 million sale price was higher than what the shares were trading for before.
It’s well known that the 11-year-old brand’s fall. After going public, Allbirds quickly expanded into physical stores and related product lines, like leggings, jackets, and performance running shoes, that its core customers didn’t care about. This led to a lot of losses, and later, co-founder Tim Brown said that the fast growth had taken away “some of our DNA.”
It was sold for a small part of the $4 billion that it was once worth. Allbirds was an eco-friendly shoe company that won over Silicon Valley.
This week, the shoe company said it was selling everything it owns to brand management business American Exchange Group for $39 million. The eco-friendly methods of the company that makes shoes from wool and eucalyptus drew in young people and celebrities from the Bay Area, but it has since had trouble getting back on its feet.
When Allbirds went public in 2021, it was worth a record $4 billion, but sales dropped quickly afterward. In the third quarter of 2025, the business made $33 million, which is a little more than half of the $63 million it made in the same quarter of 2021.
Shareholders still need to agree to the deal, and it should go through in the second quarter of 2026.
It’s not going to hold its earnings call on Tuesday as planned, and on Wednesday, the price of its shares dropped by more than 10%.
Joe Vernachio, the CEO of the company, said in a statement, “Over the past ten years, the company has grown into a brand known for comfort and innovation.””This next phase with AXNY builds on the groundwork that has already been done and sets the brand up to do well in the years to come,” Vernachio said.
Stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, who invested in the company in 2018, loved the brand’s expensive wool shoes at first. But the company couldn’t keep people buying its other goods, like wool leggings and flip-flops with soles made from sugarcane.
Allbirds was started in New Zealand almost twenty years ago by Tim Brown, who used to play professional football. Venture capitalists were putting money into direct-to-consumer brands at the same time that the company went public. These are brands that make and sell things through their own websites and stores.
In the end, the company stopped doing that and started selling the goods through stores, but sales were still going down. In 2022, it lost a little more than $101 million.
The company said that stockholders will get the net profits from the sale in the third quarter of 2026.