John Imah knows the public version of his life can sound almost too neatly assembled: the fashion-tech founder, the Met Gala regular, the AI CEO with a $1.5 billion company, the guy whose Instagram bio reads, “Rarely where you expect.” The real version, he insists, is harder to flatten into a headline.
He is a Nigerian-American entrepreneur, a former big-tech operator, a musician, a car collector, and the co-founder and CEO of SPREEAI, the fashion technology company building photorealistic virtual try-on, sizing intelligence, and personalization for retailers. Inc. reported that SPREEAI reached a $1.5 billion valuation in 2025 after raising nearly $100 million, with partners including Sergio Hudson and Kai Collective.
That is the business story. Imah’s more interesting story is what sits underneath it: the discipline, the taste, the privacy, and the part of him that still sounds more like a band kid from Dallas than a founder being photographed on fashion’s biggest carpet.
He Was A Music Kid Before He Was A Fashion-Tech Founder
Ask Imah for the most unexpected thing about himself and he does not reach for the obvious answer. Not the cars. Not the red carpets. Not the company valuation.
“I play French horn,” he says. “Like, seriously, French horn, trumpet, and piano.”
He knows the answer surprises people. From the outside, Imah’s life reads as fashion photos, sports cars, boardrooms, and technology. But music, he says, is where the noise drops away. Piano still gives him a place to slow down. French horn and trumpet connect him to a younger version of himself, one that was more focused on rehearsal than visibility.
“Music has always been the other side of my brain,” he says. “Tech and fashion get all the press, but music is where I actually go quiet and think.”
It makes sense once he explains it. SPREEAI, at its core, is about precision and feeling at the same time. The company’s product is built to let shoppers see garments on themselves, not on a model who may look nothing like them. Its own product page describes the platform as a way to render a customer’s face, body, and proportions in seconds, without an avatar or scan. That is engineering. But the emotional promise is much more familiar: a person wants to know if something feels like them before they buy it.
Imah talks about style the same way. To him, clothes are not decoration. They are communication.
His Mother Still Shapes The Way He Dresses
Fashion, Imah says, started with his mother.
“She had this incredible sense of style and she passed that on to me in a way that went deeper than just clothes,” he says. “It became how I communicate who I am without saying a word.”
His mother died of breast cancer, and Imah is careful when he talks about how much of his style still belongs to her influence. She taught him that getting dressed could be an act of respect, not just self-expression. Respect for yourself. Respect for the room. Respect for the moment.
That idea has followed him into fashion spaces where tech founders can sometimes look like outsiders in borrowed clothes. Imah does not present that way. He appears to understand the garment before the camera does.
At the 2026 Met Gala, he worked with designer Charles Harbison on a custom champagne-toned look inspired by the evening’s Costume Art theme, his Nigerian heritage, and his background in technology. Inc. reported that the ensemble included a double-breasted suit, a gold-encrusted gilet, and a long evening cape.
Imah describes the idea more simply: “We wanted it to feel like if a circuit board and a West African royal decided to collaborate.”
He is aware of the symbolism, but he is not interested in making the look feel like costume. The point, for him, is not that technology entered fashion. It is that fashion and technology were never separate in his life.
“It was never one or the other,” he says. “Both have always been completely native to me.”
He Does Not Fit The Usual Founder Mold
Imah’s professional path has moved through some of the most recognizable names in technology. His own site notes experience across Meta, Snap, Twitch, Amazon, and Samsung, and he describes each chapter as giving him a different piece of the puzzle.
Samsung taught him scale. Twitch showed him community. Snap sharpened his sense of culture and consumer behavior. Meta showed him what it means to build products that influence billions of people.
SPREEAI, he says, sits at the intersection of those lessons: technology, community, culture, personalization, and scale.
He once compared himself to Goku from Dragon Ball Z, a character who does not quite fit the mold of what he is supposed to be. Imah sees the parallel.
“I’m a Nigerian kid from Dallas who loves fashion and plays French horn and built a billion-dollar AI company,” he says. “I don’t fit the typical tech CEO profile. And I think that’s exactly why it works.”
That refusal to fit neatly into a category may be why the public has become curious about him beyond the company. He is polished but not overly available. Highly visible but still a little elusive. Comfortable in fashion rooms, but still fluent in product language. Serious about work, but disarming when the conversation turns to jollof rice, late-night Doritos, or what makes a good first date.
Yes, He Is Single
Imah is direct about his relationship status.
“I’m not,” he says when asked if he is dating anyone right now.
He does not frame that as a permanent state. He also does not pretend that building at his pace leaves a lot of casual space. Success, he says, can make dating more complicated because attention and connection are not the same thing.
“Sometimes it filters the wrong things in and the right things out,” he says.
What actually holds his attention is not someone impressed by what he has built. It is someone with her own world.
“Someone who has her own thing,” he says. “Her own world, her own ambition, her own opinions.”
Intelligence matters. Humor matters. Confidence matters. Presence matters. Imah says he notices how people treat others when there is nothing to gain, how they handle adversity, and whether they are genuinely engaged or simply performing the part.
His ideal first date is less about spectacle than atmosphere: good food, real conversation, somewhere special enough to remember but quiet enough to actually hear each other. The fastest way to lose him is to be more present with a phone than the person across the table.
For someone whose life can seem built around big moments, his romantic standard is surprisingly practical. He wants intention.
“I’m not interested in giving someone half of me or fitting them into whatever space is left over,” he says. “When I choose someone, I choose intentionally, and when I’m in, I’m all in.”
LA Lets Him Dream. New York Keeps Him Sharp
Imah splits his energy between Los Angeles and New York, and he does not sound eager to pick only one.
LA, he says, is probably more him. He likes the space, the weather, and the ability to think a few moves ahead. It is where he can create and stay focused on the bigger picture.
New York pulls something different out of him.
“It keeps you sharp,” he says. “It moves fast, demands excellence, and doesn’t really care who you are or what you’ve accomplished yesterday. It only cares about what you’re doing right now.”
That tension fits him. One city gives him vision. The other gives him pressure. One lets him dream bigger. The other pushes him to execute.
Even his favorite recent meal becomes less about status and more about attention to detail. He points to Masa in New York, not just for the food, but for the craftsmanship and intention behind every course. The best meals, he says, are not only about what is on the plate. They are about who is at the table, the conversation, and the moment that stays with you afterward.
That is a revealing answer from someone building technology around the same premise: the experience matters.
Winning Is Not The Valuation
It would be easy to assume Imah is chasing the next visible marker: another cover, another red carpet, another valuation milestone. He says the real win looks quieter.
“When a kid in Lagos, Dallas, London, or anywhere else in the world opens SPREEAI and it just works, perfectly, effortlessly, beautifully, and they have absolutely no idea how much blood, sweat, sacrifice, risk, rejection, sleepless nights, and persistence went into making that moment possible,” he says. “That’s the win.”
He does not dismiss the public moments. He understands why they matter. A Met Gala appearance can say something about fashion’s relationship with technology. A major valuation can prove that investors believe in a category. A magazine cover can make a founder legible to an audience that might never read a funding announcement.
But Imah’s destination is more personal than that.
He wants the technology to disappear into confidence. He wants someone to try on a look, see themselves more clearly, and feel a little more ready to show up as who they are. He wants a young entrepreneur, engineer, designer, or creator to see his path and think their own dream might be bigger than they were told.
“Companies come and go, valuations rise and fall, and headlines fade,” he says. “But creating something that changes how people experience the world, and inspiring others to believe they can do the same, that’s the kind of win that lasts forever.”
Rarely where you expect him, maybe. But after a while, that starts to feel like the point.
