Meet our leadership
Roote is a small company, and the people who started it are the people who still run it.
Gabriel Daniel Mlelwa
Gabriel Daniel Mlelwa is the founder and Chief Executive of Roote Technologies, the Tanzanian software company behind Roove, a campaign and market intelligence platform used by brands, agencies and in-house marketing teams.
He started Roote in Dar es Salaam in 2024, out of a problem he kept running into: organisations spending real money on campaigns, and then having no honest way to answer whether the market had heard them. Reach was estimated. Research that could have settled it was priced for multinationals.
What he works on
Gabriel leads product and engineering at Roote. He designed the idea the company is built on: that a number in a report should never travel without the evidence that produced it, so any figure can be traced back to the verified answers behind it.
He also drove the decision to build for the phones Tanzanians actually carry rather than the ones a Silicon Valley product assumes, which is why Roote's consumer panel reaches people on ordinary handsets in Swahili, and pays them for their time.
Approach
He works close to the people who use what he builds, and takes the view that a company measuring other people's honesty has to be unusually careful about its own. That is why Roote publishes its commitments on data, consent and evidence in plain language, where anyone can hold the company to them.
Alvin Lazaro Mosi
Alvin Lazaro Mosi is a co-founder of Roote Technologies, the Tanzanian software company behind Roove. He leads client work and field operations.
Alvin is responsible for the side of the company that meets the real world: the brands and agencies commissioning research, and the field teams and panellists who produce the evidence behind it.
What he works on
He turns a client's business question into a study that can actually answer it, which is usually the hardest part of research and the part most often skipped. He then owns the quality of what comes back: recruiting panellists across regions, checking responses, and following up on anything that looks too clean to be true.
Alvin also holds the line on fair treatment of the people who supply Roote's data. Every panellist opts in, knows who is asking, can stop at any point, and is paid for each verified answer.
Approach
He is the person most likely to tell a client something they did not want to hear, on the grounds that a research company which only ever delivers good news is not a research company.