Turning data into semantic platforms

Semcore was founded by Ime Akpan, a data and AI leader who has spent more than two decades building high‑impact data platforms in gaming, payments, financial services, and the public sector. As Head of Data Engineering for Vanguard UK and Europe, Ime leads teams modernising data estates so they can power analytics and AI safely and at scale.

After years of watching organisations strengthen data foundations, Semcore was created to solve a simple but painful problem: how to turn messy, decentralised data into a semantic core that every product, dashboard, and AI system can trust. Semcore focuses on data platforms, context engineering, and semantic modelling so that great models are always backed by great data.

Semcore's work is grounded in Ime's experience:

• Modernising mobile payment platforms across East Africa, including foundational work on MPesa, Airtel Money, and Orange, where resilient, real‑time data systems were literally business‑critical
• Delivering large‑scale transformation at EY in Tax, Technology & Transformation, where regulatory and data governance demands had to be met without slowing innovation.
• Leading data engineering at Vanguard, designing lakehouse‑driven data platforms, self‑serve data products, and AI‑ready pipelines for one of the world's most respected investment firms.

Across these roles, the pattern was clear: organisations win when they treat data platforms and semantics as products, not projects. Semcore exists to bring that product-mindset, clear outcomes, strong engineering, and semantic clarity to other data and AI teams.

Semcore is built on a simple belief: AI only works when the context is right. That means investing as much in data engineering, semantics, and governance as in models and prompts.

The team helps clients:

• Design semantic models that reflect real business concepts - customers, portfolios, products and policies, rather than just tables and APIs.
• Build lakehouse‑based data platforms and data products that are discoverable, governed, and ready for AI and analytics consumers.
• Implement context‑engineering patterns (RAG, retrieval pipelines, tool orchestration) so AI agents work with the right data and metadata, not ad‑hoc screenshots and csv files.

Ime is a regular speaker at Big Data & AI World, Data Products & Platforms Summit, CDO Exchanges, and Financial Transformation events, where he shares practical lessons on decentralised data platforms, AI‑ready architectures, and product‑centric data teams. He is also a long‑time mentor and advocate for broader representation in data and technology, helping professionals at different stages of their careers navigate into engineering and leadership roles.

Semcore brings this mix of hands‑on engineering, platform architecture, and people‑first leadership to every engagement, working alongside client teams to leave behind systems, skills, and cultures that outlast any single project.