What We Do
Solving health and social problems with precision.
Surgo Ventures brings together all the tools available from behavioral science, data science, and artificial intelligence to unlock solutions that will improve and save lives.
The refreshed index brings greater precision to identify where and why women are vulnerable to poor outcomes. We’ve added new demographics and outcomes data, new functionality and updated the look.
We created a single tool that identifies vulnerable communities furthest behind in vaccine rollout and provides geographically precise insights into the barriers to higher coverage
As we argue in an essay for The New York Times, the US Treasury must begin measuring progress based on need.
When you know the reason for a person’s behavior, you can design effective ways to change it. See the five vaccine personas we have identified and the geographies where they live.
Surgo Ventures brings together all the tools available from behavioral science, data science, and artificial intelligence to unlock solutions that will improve and save lives.
Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, has some of the worst health outcomes in the country. How can ASHAs— community health workers supported by the government— improve health and serve their communities more effectively?
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine encourage the use of Surgo’s COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index in COVID-19 vaccine allocation to prioritize populations that are most disproportionately impacted.
The Kentucky Department of Public Health is integrating Surgo’s COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index into their internal data and mapping tools to provide local health departments with easy access to data to inform their decisions.
Southern Bancorp is using Surgo’s COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index to target business continuity grants and low interest loans to the highest-need populations across Arkansas and Mississippi.
Surgo Ventures offers a portfolio of tools that can help governments, policymakers, businesses, nonprofits, and social impact organizations solve the most daunting health and social challenges.
From Foundation to Ventures
Mala Gaonkar and Sema Sgaier co-founded Surgo Foundation in 2015, with the goal of bringing a customer-driven approach to global health. Surgo Foundation combined Mala’s decades of experience in philanthropy and private tech-sector investments with Sema’s extensive expertise in data, innovation, and running large-scale public health programs.
As a privately funded action tank, Surgo Foundation combined smart philanthropy with a diverse team of data scientists, behavioral scientists, and technologists. Its focus: integrating ideas and approaches from multiple disciplines to solve the most stubborn health problems and developing scalable solutions to move them to action. Surgo’s model was to supplement existing programs with its own funds, expertise, and tools.
Surgo Foundation was an important experiment. We wanted to test a hypothesis: Could multidisciplinary thinking + data and behavioral science + smart tools + a customer-centric approach lead to more precise solutions and better results?
After five years, we could tell that the Surgo Foundation experiment worked — having generated a portfolio of results in maternal and child health, tuberculosis care, COVID-19 pandemic response, and more. We had the expertise and tools; now we needed to scale them for even greater impact. There was much more we knew we could do.
In December 2020, we co-founded Surgo Ventures, a nonprofit, 501(c)3 organization with headquarters in Washington, DC and a hub in the UK, focused on solving health and social problems with precision. While Surgo Foundation will continue to exist as the primary vehicle for Mala Gaonkar’s own philanthropic priorities, the new Surgo Ventures will continue playing that “action tank” role — committed to developing hyper-local, data-driven insights and solutions that can be implemented and scaled at all levels of policymaking. To ensure its legacy of delivering for the public good, Surgo Ventures will seek strategic partnerships with other nonprofits and global health policy stakeholders, as well as investments and grants from private foundations, individuals, and corporate partners.
Surgo Ventures is led by Co-Founder and CEO Sema Sgaier, and governed by a Board of Directors that includes Mala Gaonkar, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill Helman IV, and Peter Piot.
We are proud of the diversity of our team, our commitment to women in science, and the inclusive organizational culture that we actively promote.
At Surgo Ventures, we bring together all the tools available from behavioral science, data science, and artificial intelligence to unlock solutions that improve and save lives.
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