Howard alumni Jayson Johnson and Noah Adeyeye built Rooted to fix a problem every Bison knows: campus information scattered across too many places. The app now has more than 2,000 users at Howard. Dining menus are the most-used feature. Students can also pull a digital ID, vote in campus elections, and browse Grove, an in-app student marketplace.
Howard University is no longer just the campus that adopted the app. The school put $100,000 into Tree Technologies — the company Johnson and Adeyeye founded — as an equity investment paired with a licensing deal that keeps Rooted as Howard’s official campus app. Two years after the pair won $20,000 at the HU Empower Pitch Competition, the university scaled that bet by 5x and became a stakeholder in student-built software instead of buying an outside platform.
Neither founder is a side credit. They built Rooted together, pitched it together, and own the company together. Johnson, a 2026 Mechanical Engineering graduate, is the first Howard alum named a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. He is headed to Stanford this fall for a PhD in Aeronautics & Astronautics in an 87-person global cohort, and he has said Rooted does not pause for the degree. Adeyeye stays closest to day-to-day operations on the Howard side of the split.
Johnson already arrived with a stacked record: Karsh STEM Scholar, Patti Grace Smith Fellow, and HU Empower winner alongside Adeyeye. The new point is institutional. An HBCU put capital behind Black-founded campus tech its own students made, and it now benefits if Rooted grows past one campus. That is the business story, and it is why this belongs on the front page.
Why this matters: When Howard invests in the app its own alumni built, it models HBCU ownership of student technology — not just another vendor contract on the yard.