Patrick Cozzi
Chief Platform Officer, Bentley Systems; Founder, Cesium
Patrick Cozzi is the Chief Platform Officer at Bentley Systems. In this role, he supports the teams dedicated to the global community of software developers who build experiences for the natural and built environment with an open platform powered by Cesium and iTwin.
Patrick is the founder and former CEO of Cesium, the leading open 3D geospatial platform, prior to its acquisition by Bentley Systems in 2024.
He is the originator of CesiumJS, an open-source JavaScript library for rendering 3D globes and maps. Since 2011, CesiumJS has more than ten million lifetime downloads and is used to power thousands of experiences.
Patrick created 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium Community Standard for streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets. He is co-creator of glTF™, the 3D runtime asset format, an open standard which has been adopted by Microsoft®, Google®, Oculus®, and NVIDIA®, among others. He is the Co-Chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum’s 3D Asset Interoperability group and the former Chair of The Khronos Group’s 3D Formats Working Group. He is also the co-host of “Building the Open Metaverse,” a podcast that invites a broad range of technical experts to share their insights on how the community is building the metaverse together. In 2019, Patrick received The Khronos Group’s “Khronie” award for outstanding contributions to open standards. In 2023, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at The Polys - WebXR Awards for his foundational work on glTF and its use to enable an open and interoperable 3D ecosystem. He is also an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 Greater Philadelphia Award Winner.
He and his life partner, Liz, are the co-founders of CreateAccess, a nonprofit that aims to engage beginners with limited previous exposure in 3D creation to broaden access to opportunities in the field.
He has also authored, edited, or contributed to ten books on computer graphics, including 3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes, WebGL Insights, and OpenGL Insights.
In real life 3D, Patrick is an avid martial arts student, having grown up in the storied Upper Darby Boxing Gym and earning a black belt at age 41. He is an occasional runner, a frequent traveler to Japan, and a collector of retro games.
Patrick was kicked off the football team in 5th grade for bad grades. He later earned an MSE from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also taught GPU Programming & Architecture for almost a decade.