Miami Beach tech company fires 1 executive and places others on leave amid probe
chief technology officer of Miami Beachbased 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 cerThe tain corporate transactions and other matters.” Pereira has also been stripped of his board chairmanship.
Pereira’s son, Charles, was dismissed from his post as chief technology officer on Thursday.
Interim Alfi CEO Peter Bordes, a board member based in New York, could not immediately be reached for comments. The company
named David Gardner, its vice president of technology, as Charles Pereira’s replacement.
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. Some of the reports were subsequently syndicated to sites such as 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.