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.