• Nadia Carlsten, CEO of Smartbird, spoke on the public company's shift from sneakers to AI.
• When the AI pivot was announced, the company's stock skyrocketed. It has since come back down.
• Carlsten said Smartbird has a different approach to AI infrastructure, focusing on customer needs.

Before Smartbird was powering large language models, it was making shoes.

The CEO of the AI infrastructure company, Nadia Carlsten, spoke about the transition with chief correspondent Ben Bergman on Thursday at Business Insider's The Long Play.

Its roots are the sustainable sneaker company Allbirds, which skyrocketed in the late 2010s. The shoes were particularly popular among the Silicon Valley crowd. Allbirds went public in 2021 before the market turned on many direct-to-consumer businesses. The stock quickly fell, and it sold to American Exchange Group in March for $39 million.

"The short answer is the shoe business wasn't doing that well," Carlsten said.

The company then sold off its footwear business and shed most of its workforce, rebranding as Smartbird. The AI pivot skyrocketed the stock and was briefly up 800%, though it has since come back down. Carlsten, who became CEO in June, said she had never worn those wool shoes.

"The goal of the company was to do something valuable and meaningful. And for me, I knew I wanted to do AI infrastructure," she said.

After looking at the emerging AI infrastructure sector, she believed with the company's transformation, it was the "right place at the right time" for her to join.

In the five months since she took over, Carlsten said the experience can be described in one word: exciting.

"Never in my life thought that I would be the CEO of a former shoe company and managing what is essentially a startup." Since taking on the role, she has focused on building out a new team, scouring new technologies for the company to look into, and producing a new pipeline of customers.

While the stock price has gone down since the initial pivot-induced spike, Carlsten does not regret taking on the challenge. She is betting on the company's long-term potential.

"The stock market is going to do what the stock market does," she said. "What I care about is making sure that we're putting the company on the right path, and that we're able to build it quickly enough and well enough that we have a sustainable business that investors will love. So what happens in the short term? Not that important. What happens in the long term is very important."

When asked why the company decided to reinvent itself in the public eye instead of beginning as a private start-up, Carlsten countered with a question: "Why not?" she said, "It will come back up."

Having to reinvent the company from scratch can be challenging, and the public's presence is clear, she said. Yet, Carlsten said reinvention is inevitable for companies.

"This is a very public reinvention of the company, and people are watching," she said. "I think every company needs to reinvent itself every now and then."

When asked why the company is fully remote, Carlsten said most of the work at Smartbird is done virtually or at data centers, meaning an office would not be of much use.

"We spend a lot of time actually building things, which I actually love. So if my people are sitting in an office, something's wrong," she said.

Working within the emerging AI sector

Carlsten said that although her competitors are building similar AI infrastructure, the way Smartbird is going about it is unique.

"For us, it's about the right infrastructure for the right company at the right time," she said. "Our business model allows us to work more closely with customers, but it also is a lot less capital intensive."

Smartbird is looking to work with companies that have yet to explore implementing AI in their systems, she said. As more companies outside the tech realm look to adopt AI into their businesses, they have the choice to build infrastructure themselves or outsource it, and Smartbird wants to be the one to do it for them, she said.

"We'll do the infrastructure part. We'll let you focus on the actual business," she said.

The most common misconception Carlsten said she has encountered in the business is that it's all about GPUs. She said the company does a lot more than just run GPUs.

"It's really about having a holistic system that a customer can use to do AI," she said.

Another rumbling that's taken over the tech company discourse is whether there's an AI bubble and if it will pop. Carlsten said that depends on how people go about defining the bubble.

Excitement in the sector means funding might be going into companies that may not prosper in the future, but this is something that happens with the arrival of new technologies, she said.

"Every time there is a transformational technology, this happens," she said. "Even if we assume that there is a bubble, that doesn't mean that the technology is not good. It also doesn't mean that the adoption of the technology is going to go away."

• Nubank's US CEO joined Business Insider's The Long Play to discuss the bank's expansion into the US.
• The company looks to simplify banking with a digital-first fintech approach.
• US CEO Cristina Junqueira focuses on building trust through credit options and brand building.

Nubank is the largest digital bank in Latin America — now it's turning its eyes towards the US.

Cristina Junqueira, the co-founder and US CEO of Nubank, sat down with Dan DeFrancesco, executive editor and anchor of Business Insider Today, at Business Insider's The Long Play, to talk about the digital bank's expansion on Thursday.

How it began

Since its founding in 2013, the fintech bank has pushed for financial inclusivity in Latin America by providing access to banking and financial services through its mobile app. Headquartered in Junqueira's home country of Brazil, the simple, low-cost, and digital-first approach discarded the need for physical banks, which are at times harder to reach in parts of Latin America — a key part of its success in the region.

It all started with a purple credit card with no fees.

"We had this vision that data, design, technology, completely transforms people's relationship with money," she said.

Junqueira previously worked as an executive at Itaú Unibanco, the largest private-sector financial giant in the region, also headquartered in Brazil and now a direct competitor of Nubank. Today, it is the largest company in Brazil based on primary banking relationships, and two-thirds of the country's adult population are customers, she said.

Entering the US market

The digital bank is set to expand into the US after opening a branch in September, operating under the name Nu. This comes after expansion into Mexico and Colombia in 2021.

"We always saw the thesis as a global one," she said. "Everywhere in the world, people want more convenience. People want more transparency. People want simpler experiences managing their finances. People still get like paralyzed by complexity through their financial lives."

Entering America's crowded banking sector is a risk — but for Junqueira, entering no country goes without risk.

"The US is a very hard market, but I haven't found easy ones either," she said. "Building a bank is hard everywhere, so you might as well go for the biggest payout."

In the US, she said getting a bank account is still "surprisingly hard" and normally requires you to go to a physical branch, while Nu offers an easier alternative to that, she said. Foreign digital-first banks have tried to bring their platforms to the US before and failed. German fintech N26 and UK fintech Monzo both tried to expand their businesses to the US, and ultimately withdrew from the market.

The American consumer is unique, which is why Junqueira aims to take a different approach than her competitors to earn trust and scale the platform. She said most other companies started with debit cards, while Nubank is the first to start with credit cards.

Starting people out with a debit card "requires you to build a lot of trust with those customers because you're asking them to deposit their money with you," she said. "In our case, all the countries that we started, we started with credit. This is a very different relationship because you're the one trusting the consumers," she said.

Some Latin American immigrants who already live in the US are responding positively to Nu as it enters the market.

"I've been positively surprised not only by the amount of people, sure, but Brazilians, Mexicans, and others are here and have been waiting for this," she said.

Junqueira also pointed to emerging AI technology and how it could impact the company and the banking sector. She said the company is "heavily leveraging AI," integrating it in credit underwriting, customer support, and product development.

Brazil's presidential election on Sunday made headlines as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unexpectedly won a runoff against Flávio Bolsonaro, who fled the country to the US after he was under investigation for alleged corruption and money laundering. When asked about how she reacted to the big market sell-off in response, Junqueira said volatility is part of operating in a country like Brazil, but having 13 years of experience in the country has helped them learn they are going to run the company for the long run.

"We got to focus on the fundamentals, and the reality is, last quarter we turned over a billion dollars in net income," she said. "Markets don't like surprises, right? But we manage our business regardless of what happens."

Building a brand

The founder said one of the hardest things Nu will have to do in the US is build a brand that connects with users on an "emotional" level. Junqueira's dream scenario, five years from now, is to find evidence of that connection in the US.

One of the ways Nubank is attempting to spread its brand is through a recently signed deal with the Mercedes F1 team. Junqueira pointed to fans' passion for specific teams, as they follow the championship around the world, which was part of why they wanted to take part.

"We got a lot of visibility out of that, and we're working with them on brand activations," she said. "We're producing very interesting activations for consumers that help us amplify the branding fast, and that really help us bring this partnership to life."

Another huge part of the digital bank's brand is gender equality. In 2021, Nubank set a goal for 50% of Nubank's leadership to be women by 2025. Junqueira said today that the company's workforce is over 45% women, with many in leadership positions. In the four countries where they operate, all top leaders are women. Junqueira said the biggest challenge of being an executive while raising a family is not having the flexibility to juggle the demands of both roles.

"The reality is, as hard as we have to work, I think the hardest part is not having enough flexibility," she said. "It has been wonderful for us to have that type of opportunity, for us to really be able to tap into this part of the workforce that often struggles to have this type of career opportunity."

Correction — October 29, 2026: An earlier version of this article misstated Junqueira's title; she is the co-founder and CEO of US Nubank. The article also has been updated to note that the top leaders in the four countries where Nubank operates are women.