About Surgo Ventures
The CDC is now using Surgo Ventures' COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index as a resource to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our Mission
To use all the tools available from behavioral science, data science, and artificial intelligence to unlock solutions that will save and improve people’s lives.
Our Vision
To develop precise, targeted, and practical solutions that lead to better results.
What Matters To Us
We know that every single person is unique.
We explore the underlying differences between people and places and develop precise, personalized, and targeted solutions, leveraging the power of data science, behavioral science, and artificial intelligence.
We believe that to improve lives we first need to change mindsets.
From TB patients taking their medication on time to a person getting a COVID-19 vaccine, every solution ultimately requires a shift in behavior. We dig deep to understand what drives that behavior.
We think in terms of interconnected systems.
Everyone is connected in a complex and dynamic web of people, places, and information. To design health and social interventions that work, we need to understand all components of the systems that surround us and how they interact.
We uncover actionable insights others might miss.
Once our algorithms reveal patterns, associations, and cause-effect relationships — the ‘why’ behind differences among people and places — we can target the right intervention to the right person, at the right place and time.
We create tools that serve a global range of audiences.
We develop transformative tools and approaches that enable our partners — including governments, foundations, nonprofits, and companies — to more effectively improve the lives of the people they serve.
Equity is always at the forefront of our thinking.
We help solve health and social impact problems wherever inequities exist, whether in low-income countries or in the United States.
From Foundation to VenturesOur History
Mala Gaonkar and Sema Sgaier co-founded Surgo Foundation in 2015, with the goal of bringing a customer-driven approach to global health. The 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.
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.
Partners
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 work.
admin@surgoventures.org
