What were you doing at age 7? Riding your bike around the neighbourhood? Watching cartoons? Arguing with your siblings over the remote control? John Imah was doing something slightly different. He was in his family’s living room in Dallas, Texas, taking apart the household computer, completely, piece by piece, and then putting it back together again.
Just to see if he could. He could.
That moment did not make the news. It was just a curious little boy and a family computer that survived the encounter. But looking back now, it reads exactly like the opening scene of someone who was always going to build something the world had not seen before.
Today, Imah is the co-founder and CEO of SPREEAI, a fashion technology company valued at $1.5 billion, with Naomi Campbell on the board, MIT in its corner, and a Met Gala invitation to its name. His personal net worth sits at an estimated $400 million. The boy who reassembled the family computer is now reshaping how the entire world shops for clothes. Here is how he got there.
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He Sold Two Companies Before His Driving Licence
Most teenagers are figuring out how to pass their exams and survive secondary school. By the time John Imah was 15, he had already launched his first technology company and sold it. At 16, he did it again, this time in mobile gaming. Two companies, two exits, before most of his peers had earned their first pay cheque.
These were not small hobby projects. They were real businesses that someone valued enough to buy. And they gave Imah something no classroom ever could, the lived experience of building something from nothing, the discipline of following it all the way through, and the deep confidence that comes from knowing you have done it before.
That foundation would matter enormously in everything that came after.
Samsung, Twitch, Meta, Snap, and Still Not Satisfied
After studying Management Information Systems at the University of Texas at Arlington, Imah entered Silicon Valley and moved fast. Samsung recruited him while he was still at university, making him one of the youngest people ever hired in his division. From there, he built a career that reads like a tour of the most influential technology companies of the past two decades.
At Twitch, he led senior partnerships in gaming. At Meta, he built the Gaming Creator programme and was named Employee of Impact, a distinction acknowledged by long-time Meta executive Dan Rose. With Snap Inc., he served as Global Head of Partnerships under CEO Evan Spiegel, overseeing the integration of gaming features into the Snapchat platform.
Every single role made him sharper, more connected, and more certain about what he eventually wanted to build. But through all of it, one thing stayed constant, a genuine love of fashion that none of his impressive job titles had any room for. That was about to change.
The Problem He Could Not Stop Thinking About
Imah had always been a fashion person. And like anyone who shops online regularly, he kept running into the same deeply frustrating experience: you find something you love, you order it, it does not fit, you return it, and you start the whole cycle again. Multiply that by millions of shoppers every single day and you have a $100 billion annual returns problem sitting right at the heart of fashion retail.
The tools that existed to solve it simply were not good enough. Imah knew it as a consumer. And after a decade inside Samsung, Twitch, Meta, and Snap, he knew exactly why they were falling short and exactly how to fix them. In 2023, he co-founded SPREEAI with Bob Davidson and got to work.
99% Accuracy and a Supermodel on the Board
SPREEAI’s technology lets online shoppers virtually try on clothing with photorealistic accuracy and 99% sizing precision.
Upload a photo, select a garment, and see yourself wearing it, not a rough approximation, but a render realistic enough to be genuinely convincing. The results for retailers are immediate and measurable. Conversion rates climb by up to 25% and return rates drop significantly, directly improving margins.
The technology is backed by research partnerships with MIT and Carnegie Mellon University and protected by multiple granted patents. Then came the partnerships that confirmed SPREEAI had truly arrived in fashion’s inner circle.
Designer, Sergio Hudson, known for dressing Michelle Obama and Beyoncé, came on board, as did London-based womenswear brand Kai Collective. And then Naomi Campbell joined the board of directors, becoming the first supermodel in history to take a board seat at a technology startup. Fashion was paying very close attention.
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$1.5 Billion and a Met Gala Invitation
By 2025, SPREEAI had raised over $80 million in funding and reached a $1.5 billion valuation following a round led by The Davidson Group, officially a unicorn.
That same year, Imah became the first fashion-tech CEO to receive an invitation to the Met Gala, attending in a custom Sergio Hudson ensemble. Observer named him on its AI Power Index. AfroTech included him in its Future 50, celebrating Black innovators shaping the future of technology. He appeared on the cover of L’Officiel Arabia.
None of this happened by accident. It happened because a boy in Dallas took apart a computer at 7, sold two companies before he could legally drive, spent two decades learning how the biggest technology platforms in the world actually work, and then built something precise and powerful enough to solve one of retail’s most expensive problems.
The fashion industry will not look the same on the other side of it.
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