An operator. A former athlete & product manager.

Julian Owusu is a Ghanaian-British entrepreneur based in Accra. He is the founder and chief executive of BUILD Group, a holding company building Africa's AI talent layer. The group runs three operating ventures — BUILD AI Academy, which trains and certifies African professionals in applied AI; BUILD Studio, a product design and AI automation studio that deploys that talent into client work; and Cactus Talent, which places human + AI teams into British companies from the UK. The thesis is simple: train the workforce that the next decade of African technology will need, then put it to work — from Accra, through the studio, and into UK clients.

The path is not linear. Owusu was born in the United Kingdom to Ghanaian parents. Before technology, he competed as an athlete in Ghana — a chapter that ended, like many athletic 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 founded Zuberi, a digital lender focused on Ghanaian government workers — a demographic with predictable, verifiable income but very little credit infrastructure built around them. Zuberi reached roughly 20,000 customers before regulatory headwinds halted growth. The thesis was right; the timing was not. That product, those customers, and that operational learning are the foundation for everything that came next.

Owusu founded BUILD Group in 2023 as a holding company rather than a single operating business — a deliberate structural choice. The three ventures are designed to reinforce each other. BUILD AI Academy trains African professionals in applied AI and certifies them on completion. BUILD Studio takes those operators and embeds them into product and automation work for clients across the UK and West Africa, with a permanent engineering team based in India. Cactus Talent places human + AI agent teams directly into British companies from the UK. Training feeds deployment; deployment feeds placement.

The bet underneath both companies is unfashionable in the venture playbook: real classrooms, real client work, real revenue. BUILD is not a fund or an accelerator. It is an operator. The position is that the next decade in Ghana — and the broader West African corridor — will reward groups that own the talent layer end to end and treat 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.