Built by Someone Who Lived the Problem
AXAM isn't a product born in a boardroom. It was born from real-life experience, in corners of the world where the chalkboard is the only technology available.
Meet the Founder
The Story Behind Axam
Where It All Started
I grew up in Uganda, where I watched classmates walk hours to reach a school that had one textbook for forty students. I watched teachers try to plan lessons without being able to download a single resource. I watched talented kids lose interest — not because they lacked curiosity, but because the system had nothing left to give them.
Not only did I watch this life, I lived it. And that stayed with me through everything I built after.
14 Years Building Across East Africa
I co-founded Wazi Group Limited in 2010, during my second year of university. Over 14 years, I scaled it into a full-service enterprise across five East African countries — Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Rwanda.
We served over 300 clients, including UNICEF, PepsiCo, Mastercard, UNHCR, War Child, and Right to Play, and government agencies in all 5 countries delivering IT solutions, branding, marketing,print production, supply chain management, and procurement. I led cross-functional teams across borders and time zones, and directed campaigns at every level — from multinational brands to a national presidential campaign in 2021.
"But that original question never left: what would it take to give every student access to a real education, regardless of whether they have internet?"
In 2024, I moved to New York to find out.
Outstanding Impact in Science and Technology
AXAM received the Outstanding Impact in Science and Technology award at the Katz School of Science and Health's 2026 Symposium on Science, Technology and Health. In independent testing, AXAM correctly retrieved educational content roughly 99% of the time in English, performing strongly across several other languages too, all running entirely offline.
The award came alongside a peer reviewed paper, "When There Is No Internet: An Offline Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation System for AI-Powered Education," which sets out AXAM's offline first architecture, its retrieval pipeline, and the language model as judge methodology used to evaluate it.
The system retrieves from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare transcripts using BGE-M3 multilingual embeddings and a local ChromaDB index, then answers through a three tier local model stack, Gemma 3 4B, Gemma 2 2B and Qwen 2.5 1.5B, so it can match whatever hardware a school already owns. It began with 200+ discovery interviews before any serious code was written, and it now runs all the way down to silicon on Rockchip RK3588 boards.
SUNY AI Symposium at Stony Brook University
Theme: Scaling the NY AI Innovation Ecosystem
Elected among students from across the State University of New York (SUNY) system to present at the statewide SUNY AI Symposium, held April 14 to 15, 2026 at the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University.
The symposium convenes artificial intelligence researchers, educators, industry partners and students from across New York State and beyond to advance discovery and innovation, with student work presented alongside that of SUNY researchers and industry practitioners.
Read MoreOpen Education Global (OEGlobal) 2026 at MIT, Cambridge, MA
Session #31657: Offline AI, Open Knowledge, Delivering OER to Schools Without Internet
AXAM was selected to present at OEGlobal 2026, the world's leading open education conference, co-hosted by MIT Open Learning and Open Education Global. The session shares how AXAM brings open educational resources (OER) to learners in low connectivity communities.
The conference runs October 7 to 9, 2026 at MIT's Samberg Conference Center and marks the 25th anniversary of MIT OpenCourseWare, the open courseware initiative whose transcripts form AXAM's knowledge base.
Track: Exploring Emergent Technologies and the Future of Openness
Conference DetailsNSF I-Corps Fellow — Building the Team
In summer of 2025, I was selected as a National Science Foundation I-Corps Fellow, serving as Entrepreneurial Lead — a competitive, federally funded program that trains researchers to translate technical work into ventures with real-world impact.
I called Abraham Isyagi, a long-time friend, to join me as co-founder, and brought on Mehul Bafna to complete the team. Together, we completed intensive customer discovery with educators, school administrators, and NGOs across multiple states and countries.
The fellowship was a formal recognition by the U.S. government that this work has merit, innovation, and national significance.
Building AXAM
AXAM is where all of these threads converge. I built the entire RAG pipeline myself — scraping and deduplicating 7,617 MIT OpenCourseWare lecture transcripts totaling 550 million text tokens, embedding them with a multilingual model supporting 100+ languages, and deploying a quantized language model that generates accurate, sourced answers on consumer hardware in under two seconds.
No cloud. No API. No internet at any stage. The full transcript dataset was published on HuggingFace as an open resource for the research community.
MIT OpenCourseWare Connection
Since 2022, I've co-hosted the MIT OpenCourseWare "Open Learners" podcast, which has reached over 5 million listeners worldwide. The podcast amplifies stories of self-directed learners around the globe and serves as a primary outreach vehicle for MIT OCW's mission.
I've visited the MIT OCW team in Cambridge and collaborated closely with them on extending the reach of open education.
Education & Credentials
M.S. Data Analytics & Visualization
Yeshiva University, Katz School of Science and Health — Manhattan, NY (Graduating May 2026)
MITx MicroMasters in Statistics & Data Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
B.S. Information Systems
Makerere University — Academic Merit Scholarship
Currently serves as Graduate Data Analyst at the Sy Syms School of Business, managing multi-source alumni data pipelines across thousands of records. Also serves as President of the Katz African Students Association at Yeshiva University, representing over 1,720 graduate students across STEM disciplines including AI, Biotechnology, Cybersecurity, Computer Science, Data Analytics, Digital Marketing, Mathematics, and Physics.
Beyond Technology
Before any of this, I spent 23 years making music and over 20 years in graphic design. Those aren't side notes — they shaped how I think about building products that feel human, that communicate clearly, and that respect the people using them.
I also created Laba Party, an African-themed charades and taboo party game, available in Nigerian, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, and Egypt editions, and I organize monthly AI discussion meetings that connect the Ugandan diaspora community to practical AI tools.
In my free time, I also write on Medium.
"I've sat in boardrooms with Fortune 500 executives and I've stood in classrooms where the chalkboard was the only technology available. The gap between those two realities is not inevitable. It's a design problem. And design problems have solutions."
— Emmanuel Olimi Kasigazi
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Join Us in Bridging the Divide
Whether you're an educator, developer, or supporter — there's a place for you in the Axam mission.