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Axe Ahmed for Mayor

Neighbor first. Operator as proof.

Meet Axe

Say it like a neighbor. Prove it like an operator. That's not a slogan — it's my biography.
Axe Ahmed with his wife Laura in Rochester, Minnesota
Axe and Laura Ahmed on their wedding day, in black and white
High school sweethearts — married thirteen years.

I’m a Rochester kid. Son of Somali immigrants who came here with middle-school educations and outworked everyone in the room. I grew up here without much — and that’s exactly why I know what it’s like to need a city that works for you, not around you.

I played Division I basketball at North Dakota State, and I came home in 2022 to raise my family with my wife Laura. I’m a cancer survivor — facing the hardest thing taught me not to waste time on what doesn’t matter.

My background is in research, analytics, operations, and strategy — a graduate degree in business analytics from Georgetown, and years running Axlete and Axlete Consulting Group. That work kept surfacing the same gap — between the people who hold the data and the people who need it — so I built Parallax Intelligence to close it. I serve on the Planning & Zoning Commission and the Downtown Alliance board, and I’m the resident who caught the Link BRT budget gap before City Hall explained it: no title, no staff, just the homework.

So I built openRochester — a civic tool that shows how the city actually works: who decides what, where the money goes, and how residents get heard, ward by ward. Most candidates promise transparency. I wrote the software.

I’m not a politician. I’m a Rochester guy who believes your city should show you its work — and who’s willing to be measured by his own record first.

Tell us what matters →What I’ve built →

Out in Rochester

Winters on the lake, summers on the trail — this is home.

  • Axe Ahmed and his dog on a frozen lake at sunset
  • At the top of a snowboard run, looking out over a snowy valley
  • Axe Ahmed splitting firewood by the water while the family dog watches
  • Axe Ahmed resting on a rocky summit above a long blue lake

On the name

Axe is short for Abdimajid — my full first name in Somali. The “X” is a Somali letter, a sound English doesn’t have, so it usually drops out and you get “Abdimajid Ahmed.” Digging into my family history after college, I found the original spellings — Axbdimajid Axmed — with the X put back where it belongs. I kept the letter English dropped.

My grandfather called me Majid. My mom calls me Abdimajid. My in-laws call me Abs. Middle-school friends knew me as Abdi. My teammates called me Showtime. The names aren’t different people — they’re a map of who knew me when.

If you call me by a name you know me by, I still answer — and I still see you.

A note on our kids

You won’t find our children’s names or faces here. They didn’t sign up to run for mayor — we did. In an age of deepfakes and identity theft, protecting kids’ privacy was foundational for our family long before this campaign, and we’ll bring that same instinct to City Hall — guarding residents’ privacy the way we guard our own family’s.