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.
