Allbirds, a failed shoe company that was once popular enough to be a favorite of President Barack Obama but is now a zombie corporation owned by a holding company, is getting out of the shoe business. It will now pivot and become an AI company because everything is stupid and broken these days.
What started as a small shoe company in 2015 that got a big boost via Kickstarter, Allbirds eventually grew into a massive (and controversial) shoe manufacturer that opened stores across the United States, and by 2018, the company was valued at $1.8 billion. Fast forward to the 2020s and the company’s tech bro aesthetics have fallen out of fashion, and Allbirds’ attempts at expanding the brand to clothing failed. This led to declining sales, low profits, and a lot of angry stockholders. Last month, holding company American Exchange Group bought up Allbirds for $39 million. And now, the zombie remains of Allbirds are being mutilated and reshaped into an AI company.
On April 15, Allbirds announced that it had received a $50 million injection of funds from an “institutional investor” and was now going to “pivot” from shoes to “AI compute infrastructure.” In a press release announcing the odd news, the company added that the long-term plan is to “become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider.” As part of this pivot, Allbirds will change its name to NewBird AI.
After this AI announcement, the stock for Allbirds (a failed shoe company, remember) jumped over 350 percent in hours. Reportedly, shares of the company leaped from $3 to $13.
Watching a shoe company announce it is now an AI company feels like the biggest sign yet that the AI bubble is about to pop. It has similar vibes to when Kodak, a failing photography company, tried to jump into crypto right before it all collapsed, and the tech world moved on to AI. It’s also not hard not to be reminded of GameStop’s second meme stock situation in 2022, when the company announced crypto plans and hoped to recapture the initial meme stock frenzy that had happened the year before in 2021. That didn’t work out as well as hoped, but it still helped the company’s stock jump up quite a bit.
Anyway, this is just how things work now, I guess. 2026 continues to be a very dumb year.