John Imah didn't wait for permission to become an entrepreneur. He was selling startups before most teenagers had their driver's license and that early appetite for building set the tone for everything that followed.

Today, Imah is the co-founder and CEO of SpreeAI, a retail technology company valued at $1.5 billion that is reshaping how people shop for clothes online. Using AI to generate photorealistic virtual try-ons and predict clothing fit with startling precision, SpreeAI is taking aim at one of e-commerce's most persistent and costly problems: the return.

But the story doesn't start in Silicon Valley. It starts in Dallas, Texas, in a Nigerian household where the expectation was clear medicine or law, stability over risk. Imah had other plans.

The kid who couldn't leave the computer alone

Long before he wrote his first line of code, Imah was taking things apart to understand how they worked. The family computer was an early casualty. Speaking on the Black Tech Green Money podcast, he recalled how those moments of mechanical curiosity — frustrating as they were for his parents — were actually the beginning of something: a deep, instinctive drive to understand how technology shapes everyday life.

That curiosity didn't stay theoretical for long. By his mid-teens, Imah had taught himself to code and was already building and shipping products. Before he turned 16, he had reportedly founded and sold two startups — proof, even then, that he wasn't interested in just learning the rules. He wanted to play the game.

Silicon Valley, then something bigger

After college, Imah moved through some of the most consequential platforms in tech Snapchat, Twitch, Meta working across engineering and product roles. These weren't just résumé stops. They were years spent inside the mechanics of platforms used by hundreds of millions of people, developing the kind of product intuition that's hard to teach and impossible to fake.

By 2023, he was ready to build on his own terms again.

The problem hiding in plain sight

Online fashion has a trust problem. Shoppers are essentially guessing. A shirt that fits perfectly on a model might arrive two sizes too large, the wrong shade, or simply wrong in ways that are hard to articulate. The result? Billions of dollars in returned merchandise every year, and a creeping frustration that quietly erodes consumer confidence in digital retail.

SpreeAI is Imah's answer to that friction.

The company has built an AI-powered virtual try-on system that shows shoppers how clothes will actually look on their bodies not a standard model's. Alongside it sits a sizing tool the company claims can predict fit with up to 99% accuracy. For an industry where a centimeter of difference can mean the difference between a keeper and a return, that's not a small claim.

The longer vision is bigger still. Imah has spoken publicly about building an AI stylist capable of personalized outfit recommendations, as well as a virtual wardrobe where users can organize and revisit their entire clothing collection digitally. The ambition, clearly, is not to solve one problem but to reimagine the entire relationship between people and their clothes.

Unicorn status and a very interesting board

Investors have started to pay serious attention. In May 2025, SpreeAI closed an undisclosed funding round led by The Davidson Group, vaulting the company to a $1.5 billion valuation and official unicorn status.

The company has also assembled a board that makes a statement: supermodel Naomi Campbell joined alongside entrepreneurs Bob Davidson and Larry Ruvo. It's a deliberate move fashion credibility paired with business firepower as SpreeAI prepares for its next phase of growth.

The longer arc

What makes Imah's story worth paying attention to isn't the valuation, or even the technology. It's the throughline a kid in Dallas who couldn't stop taking things apart, turned teenager founder, turned Silicon Valley engineer, turned unicorn CEO.

There was no single defining moment. No lightning bolt. Just years of quiet, relentless curiosity that compounded into something significant.

For founders still in the early, uncertain stages of building, that's probably the most useful thing about Imah's story: the journey rarely looks like the destination. Most of the time, it just looks like trying something you couldn't help but try.