In 2022, Savior Brain was launched with the mission to dramatically reduce traumatic brain injury and save lives. An ambitious goal that all three co-founders, Dr. David Camarillo, Dr. Gerry Grant, and Gordon Avery, had personal experience with and were committed to achieving. The first product was a technology, incubated in David's lab, that addresses the fundamental shortcomings of helmets, SoftShox. The trio raised a small amount of money from family and friends, applied for several grants, and set off to build a great company, 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 because the existing helmets were far too hard, thus the need to soften with a new technology. Meanwhile David had his own concussions in 2015 and 2007 while riding a bike (the leading cause of sports and activity related concussion). In both of these cases, the helmet was undamaged, emphasizing the 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 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.