Our story

SoftShox was founded in 2022 to reduce concussion and traumatic brain injuries (TBI) — a mission personal to co-founders Dr. David Camarillo, Dr. Gerry Grant, and Gordon Avery. They recognized that today’s helmets use industrial foams and other materials optimized to pass lab tests based on outdated assumptions, not protect athletes in the real world where hits are hard to predict.  So, they decided to take action, developing a wearable hydraulic pad, the earliest versions of which were developed in David’s lab in Stanford.  But that’s not where the story begins.  

In 1997, two 18-year old college freshman met on a hot summer day in Princeton, New Jersey at the first day of football practice. Both engineering students, David was a linebacker from California and Gordon was a wide receiver from Virginia. David would spend the next four years on the Tigers football team, moving to Stanford University after graduation to pursue his PhD and ultimately becoming a tenured professor in the Bioengineering Department. Gordon's football career ended after a severe concussion during his sophomore year, moving to the DC-area after graduation to pursue a career in engineering and later business.

In 2014, Gerry was recruited back to Stanford after years at Duke University and serving active duty in the US Air Force where he treated patients with severe traumatic brain injury. At Stanford, Gerry and David first teamed up to study the effects of concussions on college and high school athletes. They discovered that concussions were happening at all sorts of impact conditions while the helmets were built far too stiff, focused on big impacts alone. Meanwhile David had his own concussions in 2007 and 2015 while riding a bike (the leading cause of sports-related concussion). In both of these cases, the helmet was undamaged, emphasizing that current helmet technology was not doing enough to soften the blow.

In Spring of 2022, Gordon visited Palo Alto and learned all about David and Gerry's research and the NIH grant they had won a couple years earlier. He also met an energetic PhD student working in David's lab who would two years later join as Chief Science Officer, Nicholas Cecchi. With the three men agreeing on the urgent need for brain protecting technologies and the super powers of SoftShox to meet that need, the company was born. Gordon now leads the company day-to-day in the Washington DC area with David and Gerry as key advisors and collaborators.