Retired General And Former Senator Defend Evolv

A day after Evolv disclosed the SEC is investigating them, Evolv released an open letter from a former Senator and a retired General defending the company.

The following is an open letter from IPVM in response.

Dear General Thomas, Senator Coats, and Evolv Advisory Board Members,

We deeply respect your service and commitment to America and firmly believe your roles with Evolv aim to further that.

Our organization, IPVM, has become an important resource in informing our country and citizens about physical security and surveillance, most well known publicly for our role in exposing risks with PRC China manufacturers, including Dahua, Hikvision, and Huawei.

Unfortunately, our research and investigations over the past few years have shown Evolv's level of deception shares similarities with those PRC organizations.

In your letter, you describe Evolv's approach for:

differentiating weapons from personal items as people walk through without always having to stop. [emphasis added]

We concur with this bolded, qualified language. However, just five days before your letter, and one day before the SEC informed Evolv of its investigation, in a Forbes video interview, Evolv's CEO Peter George lied, assuring, "unless you are carrying a weapon, you get to walk right in" as well as "people walk right in without breaking stride and know when they get in, there's no weapon there."

Evolv has systematically perpetuated that people can just walk right in unless they have a weapon, despite knowing internally of its sizeable false alert problem and risks of missing smaller weapons. To that end, we believe the FTC and SEC are correct in investigating the company and hope this motivates Evolv to stop deceiving the public and investors.

Indeed, Evolv is currently in the midst of a large-scale, systematic scrubbing of its online marketing materials, which is a step in the right direction, though far too late, as they have previously adamantly resisted calls, waiting until both the FTC and SEC investigated them.

Moreover, our engineers in our 12,000 sqft Pennsylvania testing facility have, to our knowledge, the only systematic testing of Evolv's conventional competitors. We have found that tuning those "metal detectors," akin to how Evolv secretly tunes its devices, delivers similar "weapons" detection performance to Evolv. In other words, we have found that Evolv's performance is less about its "AI" and more about combining conventional tuning and deceptive marketing. We invite you to our facility for an off-the-record demonstration and conversation.

We recognize how busy you are with significant commitments and responsibilities. It is not feasible for you to know and check every such detail of Evolv and its competitors, especially given Evolv's systematic deception.

We stand ready to provide feedback and input, off the record, that might help you and other former and current government leaders make the right decisions regarding essential technology for American security.