Shoe Company Raises $100M To Become AI Infrastructure Provider, Will Have Zero Employees 'By Design'

SAN FRANCISCO—Smartbird, the artificial-intelligence infrastructure provider formerly known as a company that made shoes out of wool, announced Thursday that it had raised $100 million in public markets and would begin operations with zero employees, a structure the firm's leadership called "not a problem but the entire thesis."

The company, which sold its footwear business for $43 million last month and retained only its stock ticker and a strong sense of momentum, said it would deploy "hundreds to thousands" of chips to serve customers in pharmaceuticals, energy, finance, and the public sector, none of whom it has yet spoken to.

"Legacy AI infrastructure firms are weighed down by costs like salaries, expertise, and people who know how data centers work," said newly appointed CEO Dana Pell, who began her role on Wednesday and remains the company's only confirmed human. "We've stripped all of that out. What's left is pure compute optionality and a brand customers already associate with comfort."

Analysts noted that Smartbird's $100 million raise valued the company at roughly the same figure it was valued at as a shoe company, suggesting the market sees no meaningful difference between a wool sneaker and a sovereign GPU cluster, and may in fact prefer the sneaker.

The company said its first data center would be operational "soon," pending the hiring of someone who could confirm what a data center is.

"We're not pre-revenue, we're pre-everything," Pell said. "That's the most defensible position in the entire industry right now."