John Breakey

John Breakey is a Canadian serial technology entrepreneur with more than 25 years in the IT industry. His signature venture was UNIS LUMIN Inc., a national Cisco networking and managed-services integrator he founded and led as CEO from 1990. Over roughly two decades he grew it into a Cisco Gold Partner with more than 150 employees and about $74 million in revenue before selling the business to Softchoice Corporation in 2011 for approximately $17 million — one of the more prominent Canadian channel-partner exits of that period. He and co-founder Morro Lollo stayed on briefly to help with integration.

After the exit, Breakey founded Fivel Systems Corporation in 2012, a company focused on organizational change and technology-adoption through multimedia and learning methodologies. His thesis for Fivel came directly from his UNIS LUMIN experience: he observed that poor technology *adoption* — not the technology itself — was the biggest barrier preventing customers from realizing value from their IT investments. Fivel was built after researching the training market and running a learning research project with a major college. He is the firm's lead investor and CEO.

Breakey also owns and runs GeNUIT Inc. / Promys, maker of the PROMYS PSA (professional services automation) software used by IT integrators and MSPs — a product born out of the operational systems he built while running UNIS LUMIN. Over his career he has additionally owned or operated NCS and Sutton Medical Systems.

Beyond his own companies, Breakey is deeply embedded in the Ontario technology and innovation community. He is a Director and Past Chair of the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC Ontario), Past Chairperson of the Oakville Chamber of Commerce (2002–2003), and has served on the boards of CONII (Colleges Ontario Network for Industry Innovation), Haltech Regional Innovation Centre, and Innovators Alliance. He has also acted as an industry reviewer for NSERC grants, sits on York University's Lassonde/Bergeron (BEST) industry advisory board, and is a frequent speaker and contributing writer on IT, entrepreneurship, and the future of workplace learning.

• Invests as an individual angel at the seed stage, drawing on operator experience rather than a formal fund structure.
• Gravitates toward enterprise IT, B2B/B2C software, managed services, and learning/technology-adoption businesses — areas where he has founded and scaled companies himself.
• Core operating conviction (from building Fivel): technology only creates value when it is *adopted*, so he is attuned to companies solving real adoption, workflow, and change-management problems, not just building features.
• Acts as an advisor and consultant to growing companies in addition to writing cheques — value-add is hands-on operating and governance experience (board governance, growth-company scaling, industry associations).
• Strong regional lens: much of his activity centers on the Ontario / Halton / GTA innovation ecosystem (Silicon Halton, Haltech, Innovators Alliance, ITAC).