The chief executive of Evolv, the firm behind the Adams administration’s controversial subway gun scanner program, has been fired in the wake of revelations that employees of the tech company engaged in misconduct during business deals, Evolv’s board announced Thursday.
In a statement, Evolv’s board said the termination of CEO Peter George is effective immediately and part of an effort to clean house as the company’s stock value has plunged amid the misconduct revelations and several active investigations scrutinizing the firm’s operations.
“We have determined that a change in leadership is needed to improve the company’s culture as we prepare for the next phase of growth,” the statement said.
George is being replaced as CEO on an interim basis by Michael Ellenbogen, an Evolv co-founder who has served as its chief innovation officer. Ellenbogen will get an extra $25,000 per month in salary as part of the new role, according to financial documents reviewed by the Daily News.
The shakeup comes less than a week after Evolv announced its board had found several employees “engaged in misconduct” pertaining to “extra-contractual terms” appended to sales of the company’s products between 2022 and 2024. The company has declined to identify the employees or the deals in question, though it did say one of Evolv’s “largest channel partners” was involved in one of the scrutinized sales.
Mayor Adams’ administration has allowed Evolv to install its weapons detection scanners in several places across the city on a pilot basis, including in the subways, an initiative that drew intense criticism from civil rights advocates who argued it amounted to an invasion of privacy.
The administration gave Evolv the green light to roll out its scanners underground this summer even after George told investors on a call in March that the subways are not “a good use case” for his company’s products.
As first reported by The News this month, the Department of Investigation has since at least August been probing the administration’s dealings with Evolv, whose sales team includes Dom D’Orazio, a former NYPD officer who used to work with Phil Banks, Adams’ ex-deputy mayor for public safety who recently resigned after getting his electronics seized in a separate federal corruption probe. Among other matters, the DOI probe is scrutinizing what vetting the administration did of Evolv before giving it the pilot deal.
D’Orazio and other Evolv executives started lobbying Adams’ administration for a gun scanner contract in early 2022. During that push, D’Orazio and George sat down with Banks at his office in February 2022, a meeting that was also attended by Ellenbogen, according to emails obtained by The News.
On top of the DOI matter, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission are investigating whether Evolv misled investors about the ability of its scanners to differentiate between dangerous weapons and innocuous metal objects. Those investigations are ongoing.
Last week, Adams’ administration released data showing that over the course of Evolv’s 30-day pilot in the subways, its scanners detected 12 knives and no guns. In the same period, the scanners had 118 false positives, in which the machines incorrectly claimed to have detected weapons.
It was unclear how significant those results were given that subway riders could decline to go through the detectors and still enter a station at a different turnstile, leaving anyone who might have had a weapon the option of skipping a scan.
With Evan Simko-Bednarski