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.

We Bring Precision to Six Global Health Areas:


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The COVID-19 Crisis

Leveraging data to tackle the greatest health crisis in a generation.

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The Fight Against Tuberculosis

Deploying a precision public health approach to tackle a global killer.

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Promoting Maternal & Child Health

Saving and improving the lives of mothers and babies.

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Supporting the Reproductive Health of Couples & Families

Leveraging artificial intelligence & behavioral science to promote health.

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Direct to Consumer Digital Solutions

Empowering people with easy-to-use health tools.

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Empowering Community Health Care Workers

Uncovering ways to help targeted healthcare workers better serve mothers and babies.

Our Tools Unlock the Toughest Challenges

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.

 
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COVID-19 Tools

A suite of data tools to help decision makers plan for, prepare, and respond to the coronavirus pandemic with precision.

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CUBES

Solving problems depends on changing human behavior. CUBES is a framework for understanding why people do things the way they do – and helping them change.

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Causal AI

Unlike other types of AI that only predict outcomes, our Causal AI platform helps get to the heart of why a problem is occurring – so you can design and test interventions to fix it.

Partners

 
From Foundation to Ventures

Our History

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.

 

Get In Touch

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.

admin@surgoventures.org