An operator. A former footballer & product manager.

Julian Owusu is a Ghanaian-British entrepreneur based in Accra and Group Chairman of B57, a group of companies building sovereign AI infrastructure for Africa. The argument underneath it is that intelligence is infrastructure: African data, models and compute held under African jurisdiction, systems trained on our own languages, institutions and markets, and the skills, talent and IP built and kept on the continent. Not imported, and not rented.

The path is not linear. Owusu was born in the United Kingdom to Ghanaian parents. Before technology he was a professional footballer — a chapter that ended, like most playing careers do, faster than planned. He moved into product management in London, where he spent several years inside consumer technology companies learning the discipline of shipping software at scale.

In the second half of the 2010s he relocated to Accra and co-founded Zuberi, a digital bank built around earned wage access for Ghanaian government workers — a demographic with predictable, verifiable income and almost no credit infrastructure built around it. The team, the product and the operation were built from scratch, and Zuberi reached roughly 20,000 users before regulatory headwinds halted growth. The thesis was right; the timing was not. That product, those users, and that operational learning are the foundation for everything that came next.

B57 is a group rather than a single operating business — a deliberate structural choice, because infrastructure is more than servers and each layer turns the next. BUILD AI Academy is the skills layer, a public education programme on a mission to train 300,000 Ghanaians in practical artificial intelligence. Mansco is the systems layer, a frozen-protein import and coldstore business at Tema port whose entire operation runs on AI agents the group built. Poligence is the government layer, building sovereign AI-powered services for the state on infrastructure the state controls. Cactus Talent is the talent layer, positioning Ghana as a global hub for AI-ready digital talent. The Collaborative Skills Economy is the work layer, launched at the UK Parliament, carrying Ghanaian talent into international companies and bringing the value home.

Skills build the systems. Systems prove themselves to the state. Government demand pulls through talent. Talent is placed into work. Work returns value to the skills base. Round again. The bet underneath it is unfashionable in the venture playbook: real classrooms, real operations, real revenue. B57 is not a fund or an accelerator. It is an operator, and it treats AI as an organisational operating system rather than a feature.

Owusu speaks regularly on AI and African technology, including at the LSE AI Summit, Tech in Ghana 2025 in Kumasi, and as host of AI founder programming at MEST in 2026. He has been profiled by TechCabal and Tech Labari, and was featured in the British High Commission's London-to-Accra Spotlight Series. He is positioning as a leading private-sector voice on AI and technology in Ghana, with a specific focus on the UK–Ghana corridor — capital, talent, policy and partnerships flowing in both directions.

He lives in Accra. He works in English. He runs the companies he started.