A 13-year veteran of the NFL is taking his concussion-fighting technology far beyond the playing field for which it was first intended.
When Shawn Springs was drafted by the Seattle Seahawks in the late 1990s, billionaires had yet to sprout from technology companies that would soon establish the city as an innovation hub. But one new-to-town billionaire, the late Paul Allen, bought the franchise for $194 million in 1997, fighting to keep it in Seattle because of his belief in its breakout potential.
“’Mister Allen, you know you’re going to be a billionaire,’” Springs remembers saying after the draft. “He said it wasn’t about being a billionaire. It’s about doing something disruptive.”
Springs caught the tech bug right away in Emerald City, but not until after 13 years as an NFL cornerback was he able to emulate the business magnate’s words.
Following a demo of head-protecting padding at a car manufacturer in 2012, he started investigating why football helmet technology hadn’t changed in decades. After two years of research, he debuted Windpact in 2014 when the helmet-padding startup locked in its first patent.
The Crash Cloud, its main product, is a padding system intended to protect the head from impacts at different speeds and angles. Springs says the technology’s main advantage is covering a wide range of impacts, instead of just solving for major collisions.
Since its product first hit the market in 2017, the Leesburg, Va.-based company has refined its tech and spread it well beyond the confines of football. In addition to Schutt’s football helmets and gear for other sports (most recently women’s lacrosse), Windpact’s padding is used by clients in the automotive and the military industries.
“The first question was how to improve safety for football helmets,” Springs said. “But it went so far beyond that.”
He plans to shift even more business to those two sectors while continuing to develop sports-related products and explore other suitable industries, like construction. The company recently landed a $600,000 grant from military research division Natick Labs toward developing a combat helmet for soldiers.
The Northern Virginia startup’s model has gained the attention of researchers and investors as well.
Windpact, along with one other company, recently won the NFL’s HeadHealthTECH Challenge VI and received $150,000 toward refining its Crash Cloud product. It had previously been awarded funding in the competition’s second edition to develop it.
The startup raised $5 million in an early venture round and is planning to close on another $5 million round in the next few months, Springs said.
Despite the products’ physical-world applications, he said, Windpact is a technology company through and through.
“I basically took the FDA modeling – much like how they build cars or build for the aerospace industry – and adopted that for our use, bringing it to the sports world,” he said. “The only way you can solve difficult problems with impact-protection is to have machines do it – because they’re better.”
