Patrick Cozzi

Chief Platform Officer Bentley Systems

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Patrick Cozzi is chief platform officer at Bentley Systems, responsible for the combined Cesium and iTwin platforms. He is best known for creating Cesium — the open-source engine that renders and streams the whole Earth in a browser at full precision — and for the standards work underneath it. CesiumJS began in 2011 as a project inside the aerospace software company Analytical Graphics, was open-sourced in 2012, became an independent company in 2019 and was acquired by Bentley in September 2024. Along the way he originated 3D Tiles, now an Open Geospatial Consortium Community Standard for streaming massive 3D datasets, and co-created glTF, the runtime 3D asset format that Microsoft, Google and NVIDIA adopted. He taught GPU programming at the University of Pennsylvania for nearly a decade, has worked on ten books about computer graphics, and was elected to the OGC board of directors in September 2026. The through-line is not company-building but interoperability: making 3D geospatial data portable between systems that were never designed to share it.

Career Highlights

• Chief platform officer at Bentley Systems, leading development of the combined Cesium and iTwin platform offerings and reporting to Bentley’s chief technology officer.
• Founded Cesium, spun it out of Analytical Graphics as an independent company in 2019, and led it to acquisition by Bentley Systems, announced 6 September 2024.
• Created CesiumJS, past ten million lifetime downloads since 2011.
• Originated 3D Tiles, adopted as an OGC Community Standard, and co-created glTF.
• Elected to the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium, announced 17 September 2026.
• EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2023 for Greater Philadelphia; Khronos Group “Khronie” award 2019; Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2023 Polys WebXR Awards.
• Co-chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum’s 3D Asset Interoperability group and former chair of The Khronos Group’s 3D Formats Working Group.
• Authored, edited or contributed to ten computer graphics books, including “3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes”.
• Heads Bentley’s new Philadelphia technology hub and experience centre in the Curtis Center, opened in 2026 for around 150 engineers and other staff.

Professional Journey

Cozzi took a master’s in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania and then spent nearly a decade teaching GPU Programming & Architecture there alongside his industry work — an unusual double track that shaped how Cesium was built, since the hardest problems in rendering a whole planet are graphics-pipeline problems rather than mapping problems.

Cesium started in 2011 as a computer graphics project inside Analytical Graphics, Inc., the Philadelphia-area aerospace software company, where Cozzi led the graphics work. AGI’s customers needed to visualise satellites and trajectories against an accurate Earth, and existing virtual globes were neither precise enough nor time-dynamic. The engine was named after the element used in atomic clocks, which is a fair summary of the design goal. In 2012 it was released as open source, and CesiumJS began accumulating users far outside aerospace — in defence, urban planning, drone operations, simulation and eventually in almost any application that needed to put 3D data on the Earth.

The consequential decision was to solve the interoperability problem in the open rather than in a product. Cozzi originated 3D Tiles, a format for streaming enormous heterogeneous 3D datasets — photogrammetry, point clouds, BIM models, terrain — which the Open Geospatial Consortium adopted as a Community Standard, and co-created glTF, which became the de facto runtime format for 3D assets across the industry. He chaired Khronos’s 3D Formats Working Group and now co-chairs the Metaverse Standards Forum’s 3D Asset Interoperability group. This is slow, consensus-driven work with no direct commercial return, and it is the basis of his standing in the field.

In 2019 Cesium was spun out of AGI as an independent company, Cesium GS, Inc., with Cozzi as founder and chief executive. It grew as a platform business — Cesium ion for tiling and hosting, runtime integrations for Unreal, Unity and Omniverse — while keeping the core engine open. In 2023 he won EY Entrepreneur Of The Year for Greater Philadelphia.

On 6 September 2024 Bentley Systems announced its acquisition of Cesium. Terms were not disclosed. The strategic logic was the overlap between Cesium’s open geospatial platform and Bentley’s iTwin infrastructure digital-twin platform: both are in the business of holding large, accurate, evolving 3D models of the physical world. Cozzi became Bentley’s chief platform officer with responsibility for the combined offering, reporting to CTO Julien Moutte, and the public framing on both sides was that Cesium’s openness would be preserved rather than absorbed. In 2026 Bentley opened a Philadelphia technology hub and experience centre in the Curtis Center at Sixth and Walnut, which Cozzi heads, bringing roughly 150 engineering and business staff into the city.

Outside his executive role he co-founded CreateAccess, a nonprofit working on accessibility in 3D creation, and co-hosts the “Building the Open Metaverse” podcast. On 17 September 2026 the Open Geospatial Consortium announced his election to its board of directors, with its board chair citing a combination of technical depth, entrepreneurial experience and standards work that is rare in one person.

Education

University of Pennsylvania

MSE, Computer and Information Science

Pennsylvania State University

Bachelor’s degree, Computer Science