John Imah—Nigerian-American fashion-tech founder and former big-tech operator—talks about life beyond the headlines: his French horn practice, his mother’s lasting influence on how he dresses, and what he says “wins” for SPREEAI’s $1.5 billion valuation in 202
John Imah has a talent for making his life sound harder to package than it looks.
In public. the story comes neatly assembled: the fashion-tech founder. a Met Gala regular. the AI CEO behind SPREEAI with a $1.5 billion company and an Instagram bio that reads. “Rarely where you expect.” But Imah insists the version that matters most is the one that sits underneath the photos—the discipline. the taste. the privacy. and a mindset that still sounds. somehow. more like a band kid from Dallas than a tech celebrity.
He’s a Nigerian-American entrepreneur and a co-founder and CEO of SPREEAI. a 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.
To understand why he doesn’t mind being read as “hard to flatten,” it helps to hear where his focus goes when the noise drops.
“I play French horn,” he says. “Like, seriously, French horn, trumpet, and piano.”
The detail surprises people because it doesn’t match the familiar montage: sports cars, boardrooms, fashion week flash. Imah says music is where he quiets his mind. “Piano still gives me a place to slow down. ” he explains. tying French horn and trumpet back to a younger version of himself that felt more like 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’s an approach that fits SPREEAI’s core idea: shoppers seeing garments on themselves. not on a model who may look nothing like them. On the company’s product page. SPREEAI is described as a platform that renders a customer’s face. body. and proportions in seconds. without an avatar or scan. He talks about that as both engineering and feeling—precision with intention. The goal isn’t just to make visuals. It’s to help someone figure out whether something feels like them before they buy.
That same logic shows up when he talks about style. “To him, clothes are not decoration. They are communication.” His words land like a principle, not a pitch.
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 explains how much of his style still carries her influence. She taught him that getting dressed can be an act of respect, not just self-expression. “Respect for yourself. Respect for the room. Respect for the moment.”
That mindset follows him into fashion spaces where tech founders can sometimes look like they’re wearing the part more than they understand it. Imah doesn’t present like that—he says he knows 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. When asked about the concept. Imah describes it simply: “We wanted it to feel like if a circuit board and a West African royal decided to collaborate.”.
He’s aware of the symbolism, but he isn’t trying to make 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.”
That refusal to fit neatly into one lane runs through his professional story, too. Imah’s site notes his 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 sits at the intersection of those lessons: technology, community, culture, personalization, and scale.
He even compares himself to Goku from Dragon Ball Z. a character who doesn’t quite match the mold he’s expected to fit. “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 “not fitting” is part of why the public has become curious about him beyond the company. He’s polished, but he’s also described as not overly available—highly visible, yet still a little elusive. He’s comfortable in fashion rooms, while also staying fluent in product language. And when the conversation turns away from business. he talks like someone who can be disarming about everyday things. whether that’s jollof rice. late-night Doritos. or what makes a good first date.
Yes, he is single. When asked if he’s dating anyone right now, Imah says, “I’m not.”
He doesn’t treat it like a forever state, but he also doesn’t pretend his schedule leaves much casual space. Success, he says, can make dating more complicated because attention and connection aren’t the same thing.
“Sometimes it filters the wrong things in and the right things out,” he says.
What holds his attention isn’t someone impressed by what he’s built. It’s someone with her own world.
“Someone who has her own thing,” he says. “Her own world, her own ambition, her own opinions.”
He says intelligence matters, humor matters, confidence matters, and presence matters. He notices how people treat others when there’s nothing to gain, how they handle adversity, and whether they’re genuinely engaged or simply performing the part.
His ideal first date, he says, is less about spectacle and more about 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 seems built around big moments, his romantic standard is practical. “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.”
When he talks about where he lives, the same balance comes through: Los Angeles and New York, split like two parts of his brain. He doesn’t 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. 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.”
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, he says, 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. ” but about who is at the table. the conversation. and the moment that stays with you afterward.
It’s a revealing answer from someone building technology around the same premise: the experience matters.
For a founder with a $1.5 billion valuation reported in 2025, it would be easy to assume he’s chasing the next visible marker—another cover, another red carpet, another 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 doesn’t dismiss the public moments. A Met Gala appearance can signal 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 his destination is more personal: technology that disappears into confidence—someone trying on a look. seeing themselves more clearly. and feeling ready to show up as who they are. He wants young entrepreneurs. engineers. designers. and creators to see his path and believe their own dream can 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.
John Imah SPREEAI Met Gala 2026 Charles Harbison fashion technology virtual try-on AI CEO valuation 2025 Nigerian-American entrepreneur