New York · Computer Science · Data · AI · Communication

Emmanuel
Olimi Kasigazi

I find the data you do not have yet, fix the data you do, and turn both into leads, reach, and decisions you can act on. Then I lead the teams, brands, and conversations that get the work adopted. Fourteen years turning data into outcomes across tech, media & branding, communications, health, print production, government, non-profits and education.

LLM / RAG / Agentic AI Data analytics Leadership & comms Software engineering
See the work ↗ Let's talk Play the experiments ✦
Portrait of Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi
✦
Data & People
Finding, cleaning and activating data into leads, growth and decisions, plus the AI, comms and design that make it land.
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01 · About

The person you bring in when the data that should be making you money is scattered, messy, or has not been collected yet.

I’m a New York–based Data & AI Engineer who builds data pipelines and AI applications, taking projects from stakeholder requirements through implementation and delivery. My background in software development, business leadership, and communications helps me translate business needs into technical solutions, explain tradeoffs, and support the people who use them. I hold an M.S. in Data Analytics & Visualization from Yeshiva University's Katz School, and I'm the founder of AXAM, an offline-first AI learning platform that runs on Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare lectures on old or new classroom machines with no internet and no GPU. My work sits where AI, data, and human communication meet.

Across 14+ years I've co-founded a B2B tech firm, Wazi Group , serving 4,000+ clients across East Africa, migrated millions of government records, co-hosted an MIT OpenCourseWare Podcast reaching 6M+ people, and led a national Presidential campaign during a lockdown. I'm also a VC Lab-trained Venture Institute Fellow, so I can talk fundraising from the founder's side and the investor's. I care about work that travels the last mile, technically and socially.

Download CV ↓
Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi in graduation regalia in Times Square, New York
Katz School of Science & Health ·Manhattan. New York
02 · Trajectory

Where I've been.

From a defense-ministry records migration in Kampala to AI products in New York: a through-line of data, systems, and people.

Jul 2025–Feb 2026 · New York

Data Analyst

Sy Syms School of Business, Yeshiva University
  • Built an automated ETL pipeline (Python, Pandas, SQL) consolidating 126+ fragmented sources into one centralized master database, reaching 99%+ data integrity through deduplication and standardization.
  • Developed an internal, secure RAG-powered chatbot and natural-language query interface so non-technical staff can search, query, and analyze alumni data.
  • Partnered with the Career Center, Admissions, Academic Affairs, Communications, and Marketing on alumni engagement: reorganized databases, created LinkedIn research frameworks, and delivered data products ahead of deadlines for outreach, reporting, and strategic decisions.
2025 · Remote

Venture Institute Fellow, Cohort 5

VC Lab Certified
  • Selected from 2,500+ applicants (~120 completed) for a 3-month program on how venture funds operate.
  • Covered deal sourcing, due diligence, fund modeling & economics, LP relations, and portfolio strategy.
  • Capped with the Mensarius Oath on ethics in finance.
Jan 2025–May 2026 · New York

Data Engineer / Graduate Assistant, Communications & Media

Katz School of Science & Health, Yeshiva University
  • Built a media-outreach database and pipeline of tri-state journalists for the university communications team.
  • Engineered Python pipelines that cleaned and transformed 3,000+ fragmented ERP and social records into a 99.3%-complete, RAG-ready dataset, then built a RAG chatbot on top for natural-language querying by non-technical staff.
  • Worked with a 12-person Communications team designing visual and marketing assets (event flyers, screen graphics, digital signage, social graphics, visual identity) and managing content across web, social, newsletters, and email to lift outreach, engagement, and enrollment.
  • Founded, hosted, and produced the Voice of Katz podcast, amplifying student stories and life at the Katz School and in New York City.
2024–May 2026 · New York

Founder & Lead AI Data Engineer, AXAM (Offline AI Educational Platform)

National Science Foundation I-Corps Fellow
  • Built and deployed a fully offline RAG AI chatbot from the ground up, designed to run on old computers with no GPU and no internet.
  • Conducted 200+ stakeholder-discovery interviews across New York City schools as I-Corps Entrepreneurial Lead.
  • Presented at the State University of New York (SUNY) AI Symposium and won Outstanding Impact in Science & Technology at the Katz School Symposium.
Mar 2024–Jul 2024 · Toronto

Founder in Residence

Antler Canada · Cohort TOR5
  • Advanced an AI career-guidance platform for low-wage workers to the Pre-Investment Committee stage.
  • Selected into an accelerator with a sub-10% acceptance rate.
Nov 2022–Dec 2024 · Cambridge, MA

Co-Creator & Co-Host, Open Learners Podcast

Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare
  • Co-created, produced, and hosted a six-episode podcast featuring MIT OpenCourseWare learners from every continent, reaching 6M+ listeners.
  • Owned end-to-end production with the MIT OpenCourseWare team: guest sourcing, interview design, scripting, recording, and post-production.
Feb 2014–Oct 2015 · Kampala, Uganda

I.T. Trainer / Computer Administrator

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
  • Provided computer software and hardware training to 900+ learners across 20 organizations: professionals, government workers, students, and children.
  • Deployed Java point-of-sale systems across 12+ retail chains.
May 2012–Feb 2013 · Kampala, Uganda

Intern, Information Systems & Networks

Ministry of Defense and Veterans Affairs
  • Migrated 100,000+ soldier medical records to a digital platform, implementing Oracle data-security protocols and validation systems.
  • Assisted in network administration and data-warehouse maintenance in a high-standard operational environment.
2011–2024 · East Africa & UAE

Operations & Data Lead, Founding Engineer, Wazi Group Ltd.

Uganda · 5 East African countries + UAE
  • Helped scale a technology & branding firm to 4,000+ clients and 15,709+ contracts, serving government agencies, private firms, and individuals, including UNICEF, PepsiCo, Mastercard, and Right To Play.
  • Worked with a team of 20+ to build web, PC, and mobile solutions, maintaining client analytics, performance reporting, and operational dashboards.
  • Led the nationwide presidential campaign strategy for Nancy Kalembe, Uganda's only female 2021 presidential candidate: branding, marketing materials, and cross-channel performance monitoring.
  • Took over managing operations in 2019, leading the expansion into branding, print production, microfinance, digital marketing, and procurement: 80%+ revenue growth in 2 years. Handed over operational leadership in 2024.
03 · Selected work

Things I've shipped.

A few projects that show the range, from validated AI products to large-scale data work. The full catalogue of 69 projects lives on its own page.

Featured · Founder Emmanuel presenting the AXAM research poster: 'When there is no internet, AI-powered learning for the last mile'

AXAM: offline-first AI learning

RAG · ChromaDB · BGE-M3 · Gemma 3 · National Science Foundation I-Corps validated

As Founder and Lead AI Data Engineer at AXAM, I designed and shipped an end-to-end AI product pipeline, carrying it from data sourcing and model work through packaging, deployment and release. It is built around approximately 550 million character tokens of educational content sourced from over 7,600 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare lectures and educational resources, with a three-tier LLM engine that auto-selects the right model for the device. AXAM ships as a product, not a prototype, into classrooms with no reliable internet and low-compute devices.

Outstanding Impact in Science & Technology Award, Katz School Symposium, Yeshiva University 2026
State University of New York (SUNY) AI Symposium 2026 at Stony Brook University
OEGlobal 2026 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA
National Science Foundation I-Corps NYC Regional
axamai.org ↗ Press ↗ Dataset ↗
Product · Live Kalshi prediction-market trading agent dashboard: Mission Control showing PnL, win rate and Sharpe ratio

KalshiBots: algorithmic trading marketplace

Continual learning · UCB bandits · Shipped to production

A continual-learning Kalshi prediction-market agent (dual-loop architecture, UCB bandits, 13 strategy variants) that grew into KalshiBots, a live marketplace of 15 algorithmic trading systems, plus a hybrid neuro-symbolic solver for the ARC-AGI-2 Prize on Kaggle, pairing LLM reasoning with evolutionary search on genuinely out-of-distribution tasks.

KalshiBots ↗ ARC Prize ↗
Product · Enterprise AI BiZaas enterprise AI command center landing page: Turn Company Knowledge Into Action

BiZaas: the AI command center for corporate work

Agentic AI · Work memory · Model routing · Governance

An enterprise platform that turns what a company knows into something its AI can actually use. Work Memory interviews staff and compiles their expertise into permissioned memory objects (with evidence, owners, confidence and review dates) while a workspace copilot answers business questions from real company data with citations. A model router switches between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and open-source models; an approval inbox puts reviewable diffs in front of a human before anything ships; and an admin control plane governs seats, telemetry and AI spend. Connects to Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Drive, Confluence, Zendesk, Jira and Teams.

Open BiZaas ↗ Sign in & try ↗
Data · Engineering Top: Tableau dashboard of New York City 311 noise complaints by borough, street and zip code. Bottom: bar chart of total New York Times articles by month across 2000 to 2025.

New York, at scale: 311 records & 25 years of New York Times headlines

Pandas · PostgreSQL · Geospatial · spaCy · TF-IDF · VADER · ChromaDB · ETL

Two end-to-end pipelines over New York's public record. 300M+ NYC 311 records mapped into the city's noise landscape across all five boroughs: complaint type, street-level and zip-code hotspots. And 2.2M New York Times headlines (2000–2025) run through a full NLP stack: coverage auditing, per-era TF-IDF fingerprinting across five historical eras, VADER sentiment with standard-error bands, and named-entity extraction over a 400K stratified sample, then extended with a fully local RAG chatbot (BGE-M3 + ChromaDB + quantized Gemma 3) that answers questions on the corpus with no API keys and nothing leaving the machine. Alongside both, an alumni data-quality engine that consolidated 30+ spreadsheets into 5,556 verified records.

300M+
311 records
2.2M+
NYT headlines
25 yrs
Span analysed
5,556
Records reconciled
NYC noise ↗ Read / listen ↗ NYT headlines ↗ NYT on Medium ↗ NYT on the blog ↗
Product · Founder Laba Party app: Choose Your Country screen showing African editions

Laba Party: African party game (charades & taboo)

PWA · Offline-first · Game design · ~31K MAU

An African-themed charades & taboo party game celebrating local culture, language, and entertainment, with thousands of culturally authenticated cards, multiple country editions, and offline play as a Progressive Web App. Now consolidated into African Party, one table with every edition in it: Uganda, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Egypt, with South Africa and Tanzania next. Built and shipped end to end.

~31K
Monthly users
11M+
Cards
54
Countries
3,000
Languages
African Party · all editions ↗ labaparty.com ↗ Nigeria ↗ Ethiopia ↗ Kenya ↗ Ghana ↗ Egypt ↗
Explore all 69 projects ↗
20+
Combined Years building and creating
6M+
Audience reach
300M+
Records processed in pipelines
4K+
Clients across 5 East African countries and the UAE, from governments and companies to individuals and NGOs
15,709+
Contracts, Shipped projects & works handled in all my combined fields of expertise,
04 · Leadership, building & community

Leading in the room.

Technical work is only half of it. The other half is people: leading teams, building businesses, and helping others see what's possible.

Emmanuel with the Katz African Students Association executive team
KASA executive leadership team
President · KASA

Katz African Students Association

Led an executive team of 7 serving 1,700+ STEM graduate students, organizing the Global Journeys leadership panel, a United Nations visit, a diaspora interface with Zimbabwean ministers, museum and conference trips, and 20+ workshops, panels, and professional-development programs across the year.

Instagram ↗ Event photos ↗ Katz clubs ↗
Namilyango College football team, proudly sponsored by Wazi Group Limited
Namilyango College football team, proudly sponsored by Wazi Group Limited
Co-founder · Wazi Group

14 years building Wazi Group

Co-founded and scaled a B2B tech, branding & supply-chain firm serving 4,000+ clients across six countries: from apps like SafeBoda and payment platforms like DusuPay, to a 3M+ record migration for Uganda's Registration Services Bureau, to the national brand campaign for Uganda's only female presidential candidate, during a nation wide covid lockdown

wazigrouplimited.com ↗ DusuPay ↗ URSB ↗ Campaign ↗
Emmanuel speaking at a podium
Speaking

On the stage & the mic

From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare podcast to symposium keynotes, translating complex AI and data work into stories audiences remember.

Emmanuel in a roundtable discussion
Data is the new gold
Stakeholders

In the boardroom

VC Lab-certified Venture Institute Fellow (Cohort 5, selected from 2,500+ applicants): deal sourcing, due diligence, fund modeling, LP relations, and portfolio strategy. National Science Foundation-trained in customer discovery. I've pitched as a founder and evaluated deals like an investor, fluent on both sides of the table.

Beyond Wazi Group · co-founded & led ventures
2018 · Founder
Big Bear Investment Club
Founded with my high-school classmates, an investment group that still thrives to this day.
2021 · Co-founder
Do Buy Dubai
A shipping business that seamlessly brings goods from Dubai to East Africa.
2019 · Co-founder & marketing
Festa Iqela
An annual festival celebrating Ugandan independence on the River Nile.
2019 · Partnership lead
Social Gamers Initiative
A Wazi Group × Makerere University School of Psychology partnership addressing adolescent mental health in schools.
2023 · Co-host
Open Learners Podcast
Co-hosting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare podcast, showcasing learners worldwide.
Listen ↗
05 · Recognition

In the news, seen, cited & awarded.

Featured by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, funded by the National Science Foundation, and recognized by my school and the wider innovation community.

Still from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology documentary 'The Courage to Be Open' featuring Emmanuel
Featured

MIT documentary & podcast

Co-host of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare podcast Chalk Radio Presents: Open Learners, and featured in the documentary "The Courage to Be Open", a global story about open education.

Watch the documentary ↗
Emmanuel with fellow founders at a National Science Foundation SBIR/STTR workshop
National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation I-Corps Fellow

Entrepreneurial Lead for the National Science Foundation's New York I-Corps Hub. Ran 200+ stakeholder interviews with New York State education leaders and secured competitive federal funding for AXAM's customer discovery.

Read the story ↗
Emmanuel receiving the Outstanding Impact in Science & Tech recognition with Katz School deans Outstanding Impact in Science & Tech · Katz School
Award · 2025

Outstanding Impact in Science & Tech

Recognized at the Katz School symposium for the AXAM project: "AI-powered learning for the last mile."

Symposium write-up ↗
Award · 2016

Resilient Africa Network Innovation Grant

Winner for E-musawo, a telemedicine platform, one of 8 ventures selected from 200+ applicants for last-mile healthcare delivery. Also winner of the OutBox Hackathon (2014).

Grant report ↗
Press & media
Featured in

News articles, university press, and stories that have covered my work.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT News
A whole new world of learning via OpenCourseWare videos ↗
Yeshiva University · Katz
Student entrepreneurs expand access to quality education with offline AI ↗
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT OpenCourseWare
Emmanuel Kasigazi: an open learner's story ↗
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Global
A whole new world of learning via OpenCourseWare videos ↗
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Open Learning
Podcast highlights how anyone in the world can benefit from open education ↗
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Open Learning
Ten inspiring learner stories from MIT Open Learning ↗
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT Open Matters
Looking back at the "Open Learners" podcast series ↗
Wikipedia
Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi ↗
06 · Expertise

Many crafts,
one operator.

Most people are a builder or a communicator. The useful ones are both: they can find and model the data, design the brand around it, and then move the room. That overlap is where I work, and it is why the data actually gets used instead of filed.

◆ AI / LLM / Agentic systems

Applied AI & LLMs

Production RAG pipelines, agentic AI systems, and edge/on-device inference: quantized models that run fully offline on zero-GPU hardware, built to run reliably, not just demo well. All of it shipped from Linux, my daily-driver OS for 16+ years.

RAGAgentic AIEdge AIQuantizationBGE-M3Gemma 3llama.cppMCPLinux · 16 yrs
◆ Data analytics & science

Data Analytics, Science & ML

It's literally my master's. Analytics, visualization, classification, regression, and explainable models with real-world stakes, from ICU survival to household financial risk, communicated for decision-makers.

PythonRTableauPower BIXGBoostSHAPStatistics
◆ Data engineering

Data Engineering

ETL, dimensional modeling, and data-quality pipelines that turn messy reality into tables you can trust, then push that data into the tools where it earns: CRM fields, target lists, campaign audiences, dashboards. 126+ scattered sources into one clean table; 300M+ records at scale.

PostgreSQLPandasStar schemaSCD2MS FabricSQLEnrichmentWeb scrapingActivation
◆ Leadership & comms

Leadership & Story

Stakeholder discovery, executive communication, podcasting, and team leadership: leading teams of 7, 200+ National Science Foundation customer interviews, and audiences in the millions. Data that lands. VC Lab-certified through the Venture Institute in deal sourcing, due diligence, fund modeling, LP relations, and portfolio strategy, so I can hold my own on either side of the fundraising table.

StrategyPublic speakingPodcastGTMProductStakeholdersVC Lab certified
◆ Design, branding & print

Design, Branding & Print Production

A self-taught graphic designer: it was the very first thing that ever got me paid. That craft grew into Wazi Group's branding, print-production, and procurement arm, building brand identities for companies, NGOs, and a national presidential campaign across East Africa.

From logo inception and visual identity to large-format print, signage, and supply chain, I've shipped brand systems end to end for 4,000+ clients. Design isn't a side skill for me; it's where the storytelling and the systems thinking first met.

Brand identityLogo & visual systemsPrint productionAdobe SuiteInkscapeCanvaFigmaProcurement
Why a data person, and why now

Everyone wants AI.
AI runs on good data.

Models are the commodity now. The difference between a company getting real money out of AI and a company getting a demo is whether somebody did the unglamorous work underneath: finding the data, cleaning it, structuring it, and keeping it trustworthy. That work is the bottleneck in front of almost every result you want. It is also the work I do.

◆ 01 · Foundation

Find it and fix it

Most of the value sits upstream. I go and get the data you do not have (public records, web research, enrichment) and repair the data you do: deduplicated, verified, joined, documented. One recent clean-up took 126+ scattered sources and 20,918 messy rows down to 5,556 records that could be trusted.

◆ 02 · Activation

Put it where it earns

Data sitting in a warehouse earns nothing. I move it into the places that actually make money: target lists, CRM fields, campaign audiences, scoring models, and dashboards a team opens on a Monday morning instead of ignoring.

◆ 03 · Outcome

Leads, reach, decisions

The scoreboard is not a dashboard. It is pipeline, qualified conversations, audience growth, and decisions made faster: a 553-contact journalist outreach database built from scratch, a 30% rise in channel engagement, a market-entry plan for three countries.

07 · Services

Work with me.

Open to full-time roles, and to focused freelance and consulting engagements. Six things I am regularly hired to deliver:

  1. 01

    Find the data you do not have

    Most of what you need already exists and nobody has collected it. I source it: public records and open datasets, web research and scraping, third-party enrichment, then verify it so you are acting on something real. A recent build: a 553-contact journalist and media database, researched and assembled from nothing.

    Data sourcing
  2. 02

    Leads, pipeline and go-to-market data

    Your target list is a data problem before it is a sales problem. I build and enrich the lists, define who actually fits, score the accounts worth your team's time, and clean the CRM so good leads stop going cold in the gap between marketing and sales.

    Lead gen & GTM
  3. 03

    Audience and reach growth

    Who is paying attention, what they respond to, and what to do more of. Channel and content analytics, audience segmentation, and measurement that connects a piece of content to a result. This approach contributed to a 30% rise in engagement and 25% enrollment growth on a university's channels.

    Audience growth
  4. 04

    Analytics, BI and dashboards that get used

    Messy, raw data turned into decision-ready answers: cleaning, statistical analysis, and explainable models, delivered in Power BI, Tableau or Microsoft Fabric and accelerated with AI for natural-language querying. You get recommendations a stakeholder can act on, not a pile of numbers.

    Analytics & BI
  5. 05

    A private AI chatbot on your own data

    A custom AI assistant trained on your documents: on-premise or on-device, fully private so nothing leaves your infrastructure, RAG-built and tuned for the hardware you already have. The same architecture I proved in AXAM.

    Custom RAG
  6. 06

    Graphic design & branding

    20+ years shaping how brands look: identity and logo systems, UI/UX, and end-to-end print and large-format production, for clients from a national presidential campaign to global NGOs (USAID, UNHCR, War Child).

    Design
Essays & field notes

The thinking
behind the work.

Read my writing →

Essays on AI, data, building useful things, and being human in a changing world. From offline intelligence to the stories hidden in millions of headlines.

Side quest · Game Lab

Serious work.
A little mischief.

Six tiny, zero-dependency experiments turn the real AI, data, design and systems work on this page into things you can play.

Open the Game Lab → Try project roulette
01CMYK ChaosPull the print plates back into registration.
02Vector DeflectorCatch clean data, let the noise fall.
03Data or Delusion?Guess the real proof points.
04-06Pipelines + logicRepair a RAG pipeline, route 311 data, build impact.
Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi
Open to roles & collaboration

Let's build something
that reaches people.

Whether that is a role on your team or a project that needs data found, fixed and turned into leads, reach and decisions, the fastest way in is a short conversation. Based in New York, working everywhere.

Book a call
08 · FAQ

Quick answers.

The short version, for people and the AI assistants that increasingly do the first round of research.

Who is Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi?

Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi (also known as Emmanuel Kasigazi, Olimi Kasigazi, or olimiemma online) is a New York–based AI and data professional, founder of AXAM, and a National Science Foundation I-Corps Fellow. He holds a M.S. in Data Analytics & Visualization from Yeshiva University's Katz School and has 14+ years building production systems across fintech, health, and education.

What does he do?

He turns data into money and reach. That means finding data a business does not have yet (public records, web research, scraping, enrichment), cleaning and joining the data it does have, and activating it as leads and pipeline, target lists and scoring, audience growth, and analytics leaders act on. On top of that he builds the AI layer: RAG pipelines, agentic AI, and machine-learning models, and leads the teams and communication that get them adopted. Client engagements: data sourcing, lead generation and go-to-market data, audience and reach growth, analytics and BI in Power BI & Tableau, private on-prem RAG chatbots, and graphic design and branding (20+ years).

What is AXAM?

AXAM is Emmanuel's offline-first, AI-powered learning platform for places without reliable internet. It encodes 7,617 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare lectures into 121,000+ vectors with a three-tier LLM engine, and was validated through the National Science Foundation I-Corps program.

Is he available for hire?

Yes. He is open to roles in AI/ML, data science, data engineering, and product or leadership, plus collaborations. The fastest way to reach him is the "Email me directly" button below or by booking a call via Calendly. He is based in New York and works remotely.

Why hire a data person before an AI project?

Because the AI is rarely the bottleneck. Retrieval, agents, and models all sit on whatever data you already have, and most organisations discover mid-project that theirs is incomplete, duplicated, or scattered across systems nobody owns. Sorting that out first is what separates an AI investment that returns money from one that returns a demo. It is also cheaper to fix before the build than after.

What makes his background distinctive?

He pairs deep technical build skill with leadership and communication: co-hosting an MIT OpenCourseWare podcast that reached 6M+ people, leading teams, and running 200+ NSF customer interviews, plus a self-taught design and branding craft that served 4,000+ clients across five East African countries and the UAE.