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About
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Founder/CEO of Rooted. Workforce-equity SaaS placing low-income adults into living-wage jobs and proving the outcomes. 9 paying institutions, 430 adults placed, $11K MRR.Asha Mensah spent the first decade of her career inside the workforce-development system she now serves — five years as a case manager and then program director at a nonprofit workforce board in Atlanta, where she watched talented, under-employed adults churn through job-training programs that could never actually prove whether anyone landed a living-wage job at the end. The data lived in spreadsheets, the outcomes were self-reported, and every renewal cycle the funders asked the same question nobody could answer with evidence: did this work? In 2023 she left to build the tool the system was missing. Rooted is a workforce-equity SaaS for community colleges and workforce boards: it manages the placement pipeline (intake, employer matching, wraparound support) and, crucially, instruments the outcome — verified job placement, wage at placement, and 6- and 12-month retention — so a program can show, not claim, that it moved someone into a living-wage job. Asha is a solo founder by circumstance (her would-be technical co-founder took a job at a big tech company before they incorporated), pragmatic and mission-anchored rather than hype-driven, and explicitly building a MISSION_SCALE organization: durable, evidence-first, optimized for outcomes-per-dollar rather than a venture rocket-ship. Rooted has crossed into early revenue — 9 paying institutional contracts (community colleges and a regional workforce board) at roughly $11,000 MRR — and, more importantly for her thesis, it has produced a measured impact outcome: 430 adults placed into jobs through partner programs, 71% still employed at six months, with a documented average wage lift. Her superpower is lived domain authority and outcome rigor; her gap is that she has almost no formal capital backing and a thin named advisory bench — no institutional check, one informal mentor, a single community supporter vouching for her. On f3 she is the textbook impact founder whose EDGE (domain fit + outcome data) and PULSE (revenue + placements shipped) are strong, SIGNAL is respectable for a B2G/B2I motion, and TRUST is the binding constraint holding her score down — which is exactly why catalytic grant capital and a mission-aligned angel are the right de-risking path, and why she is the canonical match for the foundation funders' impact thesis.
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Building
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Founder Profile
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Archetype Tags
solo-foundermission-drivenimpactworkforceb2gdomain-expert-founder
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0 reported · 0 confirmedNothing here moves TRUST yet