The Giving Pledge has announced that Phillip Terrence "Terry" Ragon and Susan Ragon have pledged to commit at least half their wealth to philanthropy.

Ragon, owner of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based data software company InterSystems, and Susan, an executive at the firm, are co-founders of the Phillip and Susan Ragon Foundation. In 2009, following a trip to South Africa, where he witnessed the ravages of AIDS on a significant scale, Ragon, with his wife, established the Ragon Institute with the goal of developing a vaccine for HIV. A research partnership of Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University, the institute is focused on harnessing the immune system to prevent and cure disease.

The couple's pledge letter also highlights their efforts to build schools for poor communities in Bogota, Colombia, where Terry Ragon spent a year as a high school student. Their foundation's grantmaking has included support for community recreation, in-patient medical care, libraries, youth development, and Christian institutions.

"My passion has been helping people in need in developing countries develop the ability to help themselves," wrote Terry Ragon. "These are people who need help through no fault of their own....Ultimately, our real goal is to leave the world at least a little better than we found it — or at least better than it would otherwise have been."

During the second half of 2016, investment firm Metropoulos & Co. founder Dean Metropoulos and his wife, Marianne, and Tanzanian businessman Mohammed Dewji also joined the Giving Pledge. Established in 2014, the Mo Dewji Foundation funds health, education, and human services in Tanzania.

For more information on the Giving Pledge, visit the Eye on the Giving Pledge section of the Foundation Center's Glasspockets.org site.