Black Woman in tech artificial intelligence researcher, has a vision for transforming Mississippi hometown into a thriving hub for tech entrepreneurs.
Her plan for the $25-million Jackson Tech District is a bold one for a place not known for its tech prowess. For Sephus, bringing investment to a community that’s been left out is a big part of the appeal. “It’s clear that people don’t expect anything good to come from Jackson,” she says. “So it’s up to us to build something for our hometown, something for the people coming behind us.”
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The idea didn’t occur to Sephus to build a tech hub until 2018, as she was looking for office space for the Bean Path. She focused her search on the downtown area of Jackson, in part to help revitalize it. While the area had long ago served as a bustling hub for Black-owned businesses, it had fallen into disrepair in recent years.
“There still wasn’t a lot of Black ownership in large parcels of land, especially in the downtown area,” she says.
The ambition of her undertaking notwithstanding, Sephus says the fact that the plan came from her is still wild. “It had never occurred to me,” she says, “even though I had sold a company to Amazon and was working with some of the top people at Amazon and having led a whole startup, started our own nonprofit. It just never occurred to me that I, a young Black female, could buy a building in downtown Jackson, Mississippi.”
