AI in Public Health Fund

Since December 2025, the Humane Intelligence x NYU Center for Health Data Science AI in Public Health working group has engaged over 150 public health professionals, practitioners, and technical experts worldwide to research and position a new AI for Public Health fund for the advancement of economic opportunity. We are currently raising capital for a proof-of-concept fund.
Read the concept note

What will be funded?

Thematic Focuses

Any thematic area within public health will be eligible for funding, especially initiatives that meaningfully link often disparate fields, such as medical patient care, pharmaceutical science, environmental health, and population health.

Project Implementation

We will work with innovators, organizations and entrepreneurs to help implement and deploy AI solutions that address the broader drivers of population wellbeing and create pathways for economic empowerment.

Research and Evaluation

Our fund will provide dedicated support to grantees to address critical research and evaluation needs, and ensure funded AI solutions mitigate against bias, hallucinations, factual inaccuracies, and perpetuating existing harms.

Last-Mile Delivery

Our fund will leverage our network of global health organizations to help grantees access or build local connections to enable last-mile delivery of AI solutions.

Our theory of change

The fund will incubate, accelerate, and scale AI-enabled solutions to persistent public-health barriers that constrain economic opportunity, enabling healthier populations to participate more fully and productively in economic growth.

What gaps will be filled?

We spent six months researching and gathering community feedback to identify where there are significant capital roadblocks, how our fund will fill real needs and gaps, and where the fund leads – Humane Intelligence and the NYU Center for Health Data Sciences – can best serve the community. This is what we found.
Want to capitalize this fund?

We invite you to explore our financial brief describing how the fund can be most effectively capitalized and administered.

Financial brief

Expected Impact

  • Move the public health industry beyond disconnected health benchmarks and towards real-world assessments
  • Chart pathways to meaningfully combine public health, medical health, pharmaceuticals, and environmental sciences data, knowledge and methods using generative AI
  • Enable stakeholders to understand how to evaluate for not only AI technical performance, but for equitable and contextually relevant use
  • Set new standards of how future AI and public health funds should be designed and launched
  • Empower public health practitioners and stakeholders to use AI to address population health challenges and, in doing so, expand opportunities for equitable economic participation and advancement.

What if the fund didn’t exist?

  • Investments for AI solutions may disproportionately support mitigating catastrophic risk and harms that are recent and visible. The AI philanthropic funding boom may miss alleviating chronic and systemic harms that stunt economic growth.
  • Without this fund, impactful AI solutions won’t be adopted at the expected rate or scale, as public health has historically been a discipline that has pushed the positive boundaries of technology for social good adoption.
  • Without this fund, there will be constant demand to generate more health data without looking critically at how existing data can be responsibly combined and repurposed to drive better health outcomes. This is especially critical in low-resource settings.
  • AI in public health funding will remain geographically uneven. Less than 30% of AI in public health funding goes to low- and middle-income countries. [See here]

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