Shakeup at Miami Beach tech company as executives fired, placed on leave amid probe
The chief technology officer of Miami Beach-based facial recognition firm Alfi Inc. has been fired and its CEO and CFO placed on leave pending an investigation into “certain corporate transactions,” the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Alfi co-founder Paul Pereira, who also serves as the company’s president, and chief financial officer and treasurer Dennis McIntosh, were put on paid administrative leave on Oct. 22, the company said in the Oct. 28 filing, pending an “independent internal investigation regarding certain corporate transactions and other matters.” Pereira has also been stripped of his board chairmanship.
Meanwhile, Pereira’s son Charles, the company’s former chief technology officer, was terminated Thursday.
Interim Alfi CEO Peter Bordes, a board member based in New York, could not immediately be reached for comment. The company named David Gardner, the company’s vice president of technology, as Charles Pereira’s replacement.
After debuting on the NASDAQ exchange in May at $2.90, Alfi shares briefly soared as high as $18.59, joining the ranks of so-called “meme” stocks that had gathered momentum through reddit discussion boards. Its shares have since plummeted to less than $5, and the stock fell by 22% Friday to $4.42 before recovering Monday to $4.71.
Alfi was the subject of a feature in the Columbia Journalism Review last week on companies that have paid for positive coverage from online financial news outlets, including Benzinga.com, which subsequently get syndicated to sites like Yahoo! Finance.
The Miami Herald reported in late September on Alfi’s facial recognition technology, which the company says can identify a user’s age, gender and mood to serve them advertising without violating their privacy. It also said its technology could identify a user’s ethnicity, but that it would not activate that technology.
Alfi has said it expected to have advertising inventory by the end of 2021 “in excess of $100 million,” and that it would have over 150,000 tablets deployed in Ubers and Lyfts by the end of 2022. In September, it reported a net loss of more than $4 million.
This story was originally published November 1, 2021 at 3:56 PM.
