Advisors

Adam Schlesinger is a seasoned executive with over 20 years of experience in transformation and revenue growth leadership roles across the banking and technology sectors. He currently advises startups in the FinTech, Payments, and AI spaces and serves as an independent board director for a federally chartered U.S. Bank.

Adam has successfully built and exited startups to major companies like Zoom and Bumble and taken others public on the TSX, Nasdaq, and NYSE. As the former Chief Transformation Officer at First Republic Bank, he developed client-focused technology offerings and innovative solutions that challenged industry norms. Prior to this role, he led Breakout Ventures at the National Bank of Canada, creating $1B+ revenue streams and spearheading digital and data platform transformations.

With a decade-long tenure at Microsoft, Adam managed significant financial services relationships and drove over $1.5 billion in revenue. His diverse expertise includes investment banking, M&A, and software sales.

Adam holds a Master of Engineering from MIT and a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill University. He splits his time between Miami, Los Angeles, and Montreal.

Beri is a Product lead with over 10 years of experience, specializing in B2B products. She spent her product career at startups in Toronto and at Google, focusing on strategizing, executing and launching products that are earlier in their lifecycle. She excels at balancing stakeholder management and quality product demands with ambitious timelines.

Beri holds a PhD in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo. She is based in Toronto, where she enjoys taking long walks with her precocious German Shepherd.

Donny is passionate about developing products that harness healthcare data analytics and machine learning to promote healthier living in a sustainable and responsible way. Currently, he leads engineering for the Healthcare and Life Sciences AI product portfolio at Google Cloud, including generative AI applications like Google’s MedLM.

Prior to this, Donny was a senior scientist at a Toronto-based medical device startup, focusing on medical imaging device design and image reconstruction algorithms. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, where his research centered on quantum computing.

Driven by a commitment to continuous learning, Donny is excited to tackle complex challenges in healthcare data understanding.

François Gauvin is a CPA, CA with over 35 years of experience in mergers and acquisitions, international tax planning and venture capital. He has provided Inovia Capital steady, diligent leadership for over more than a decade, ensuring that transparency and rigour remain core to the Firm’s reputation.

Prior to joining Inovia in 2007, François was the Investment Director at the Fonds de Solidarité FTQ (FsFTQ), a $16B Montreal-based labour-sponsored fund, where he was responsible for FsFTQ’s investments in venture capital funds. After investing in Inovia’s first fund on FsFTQ’s behalf, he joined the Firm as Partner-CFO and has been involved in every single transaction Inovia has ever done. He is a board member of Réseau Capital and an active member of the CVCA CFO task force.

Ilia Tulchinsky is Senior Vice President of Software Development at Verily, where he also serves as Verily Product Engineering Lead and Site Lead for Verily Canada. He joined the company in March 2021 to help transform the innovation lab into a mature company focused on using precision data to power care and life sciences research.

A software developer with over 30 years of experience, Ilia has worked across the medical device, mobile, media, and data mining sectors. His career began in neurology-focused medical devices, and he later spent 15 years at Google building infrastructure and applications across Ads, mobile, enterprise tools, and AI. He went on to lead the development of the Google Cloud Healthcare and Life Sciences platform, advancing interoperability standards and foundational AI models in natural language processing and medical imaging.

Verily, an Alphabet company launched from Google X in 2015, applies a data-driven approach to improving health and life sciences research. Its mission is to make precision health accessible to all by integrating clinical, behavioral, social, and real-world data into evidence-based, personalized solutions.

Ilia lives in Canada with his two daughters and spends every winter weekend on the ski slopes.

JP Chauvet, with over 25 years of technology leadership experience, is Inovia Capital’s new Executive in Residence. He played a pivotal role in transforming Lightspeed Commerce into a global tech leader. JP joined Lightspeed in October 2012 as Chief Revenue Officer, became a board member in September 2013, and was named President in April 2016. He served as CEO from February 2022 until February 2024, guiding the company through significant milestones, including strategic acquisitions, listings on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange, and the launch of Lightspeed Payments.

Under JP’s leadership, Lightspeed grew to employ nearly 3,000 staff worldwide and became a one-stop commerce platform for merchants globally. Before Lightspeed, JP held various leadership roles at Atex Group, Nstein Technologies, and IXIASOFT Technologies.

Now, as an Executive in Residence at Inovia, JP brings his wealth of experience and strategic insight to support portfolio companies, offering guidance on growth, M&A, and sales strategies.

Mike has 20+ years of industry experience working as a Staff Engineer.  He has worked most of his career at Google building scalable and reliable SAAS solutions.  His contributions to many domains include Observability, Experiments frameworks, Ads and CI/CD.  He is really passionate about delivering scalable solutions that exhibit operational excellence.

Mike holds a BMath from Waterloo University with a Double Honours degree in Combinatorics & Optimization and Computer Science.  Outside work, he enjoys spending time with family, hiking, fishing and camping.

Mohit Cheppudira specializes in systems infrastructure at the intersection of security, networking, data platforms, and AI. Most recently at OpenAI, he helped design and operate large-scale AI supercomputing systems, supporting multi-datacenter training and inference for some of the world’s most advanced models. He has also built identity and access systems, and developed cryptographic primitives for model protection and user privacy.

Before joining OpenAI, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he led teams responsible for mission-critical infrastructure powering Google Cloud, Google Search, and other core products. His work spans distributed systems, networking, and sovereign cloud architectures for highly sensitive environments.

He is an active open-source contributor and explores the intersection of software and music in his spare time.

Paul Church is an Executive in Residence at Inovia Capital with nearly two decades of experience at Google. A seasoned engineering leader, Paul helped scale teams and drive product innovation in ads and healthcare, working at the intersection of machine learning, cloud infrastructure, and global standards. Most recently, he led engineering for the Healthcare and Life Sciences data platform portfolio at Google Cloud, including the Healthcare API. Based on a 122-acre farm near Waterloo, Paul draws on his deep technical and operational expertise to support early-stage founders tackling complex problems in AI, healthcare, and enterprise software.