Aaron Rodgers has taken some trips to the Pacific Northwest he’d probably rather forget. Rodgers, who since 2008 has been the starting quarterback of the National Football League’s Green Bay Packers, has a career 1-4 record in regular season and playoff road games against the Seattle Seahawks, including an overtime loss in 2015 that sent the Seahawks to the Super Bowl.
Those sour memories aside, Rodgers is among the many backers of the Emerald City’s early-stage business community. He was one of the participating investors in a funding round Vicis, a Seattle-based startup that manufactures football helmets designed to protect against head and brain injury, first announced in November and recently said has grown to $30 million. Vicis says the funding will support its effort to ramp up production and sales of the helmet it makes for younger players.
Rodgers and another well-known NFL quarterback, the Washington Redskins’ Alex Smith, had both invested in Vicis previously; the two players have provided the company with capital through Rx3 Ventures, a California-based fund Rodgers co-leads, Vicis says.
“We have a responsibility to protect young players for football to continue to thrive,” Smith says in a prepared statement.
Vicis, a University of Washington spinout founded in 2014, says it has now raised more than $85 million in outside investment.
Traumatic brain injuries, a category that encompasses the concussions athletes can get when their heads hit the ground or another player, have been a hot topic in football and other contact sports over the past decade. Following the publication of scientific research suggesting that some athletes who play these sports could face a higher risk of brain injury and early-onset dementia, longtime helmet manufacturers and newer entrants to the industry, like Vicis, are marketing their helmets’ safety features and performance in tests simulating on-field hits.
In 2005, forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh described a link between repetitive brain trauma and a neurodegenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. According to Boston University’s CTE Center, the disease is “found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma (often athletes), including symptomatic concussions.” Leaders at the research center were among the authors of an investigation published in mid-2017 that studied the brains of 202 deceased tackle football players. The researchers diagnosed CTE in 87 percent of them. (Currently, CTE can only be diagnosed after death.)
As the body of scientific research linking CTE with repeated hits to the head has grown, the NFL finds itself fighting to try to extend a decades-long run of growth and strong financial performance, and maintain the popularity of the league with its millions of fans worldwide.
Many of the families of former players afflicted with early-onset dementia have sued the NFL. In some cases, courts have ruled in their favor, most notably in a 2015 ruling by a judge who ordered the NFL to pay up to $1 billion to settle concussion lawsuits. The league has also made changes to several rules, including new restrictions on kickoff plays and penalizing defenders who make helmet-to-helmet contact with ball carriers.
Meanwhile, some view changes to the helmets themselves as another potential path to making football safer.
Vicis does not claim that its helmets reduce the number of concussions, or eliminate them. However, the startup’s website cites research supporting “the role of impact force reduction in mitigating concussion risk and severity.”
The padding inside Vicis’ flagship Zero1 helmet and other models it’s developing houses flexible rods that deform and buckle when the helmet makes contact with another object. The design is aimed at getting these rods to absorb the force
