EvoNexus portfolio company Odin Diagnostics has signed a three-year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC). The agreement brings Odin Diagnostics together with NHRC to advance ODIN™, the company’s AI-powered eye-tracking platform for concussion assessment. The goal: a non-invasive, fieldable way to detect traumatic brain injury (TBI) in warfighters earlier.
“Concussion is an invisible injury. Diagnosis often comes down to what a service member reports and what a medic can observe in a few minutes,” said Connor Heffler, CEO of Odin Diagnostics. “We’re building ODIN™ to give care teams an objective tool they can use anywhere. Now we have the opportunity to work alongside NHRC’s talented team, and we couldn’t be more excited. Their expertise will help us shape ODIN™ around the realities of military operational medicine.”
An Injury That Hides in Plain Sight
Over 535,000 U.S. service members have been diagnosed with a TBI since 2000, according to the military’s Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence. That’s more than the entire active-duty U.S. Army, and it doesn’t count the injuries that were never diagnosed. More than 80 percent of those cases are mild TBI, better known as concussion. They happen in training, sports, and everyday life as well as on deployment.
Concussions can be difficult to catch. They typically don’t show up on standard brain imaging, so identifying one often depends on symptom reports and a clinician’s judgment. That is a tall order everywhere, from a busy emergency department to a ship at sea or a training range.
How the Collaboration Works
A CRADA is a formal agreement, authorized by the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, that lets a federal laboratory and an outside organization collaborate on research and development.
NHRC, located on Naval Base Point Loma, conducts research, development, testing, and evaluation to optimize the operational readiness and health of the nation’s armed forces. It is the only military medical research laboratory on the West Coast and has been the Department of Defense’s designated Deployment Health Research Center since 1999. The lab also brings extensive expertise in TBI detection and rehabilitation to the work.
Under the three-year agreement, Odin Diagnostics will have access to researchers and clinicians who test and treat TBI and vestibular conditions in acute and chronic settings, as well as to the end users the technology is meant to serve. The collaboration addresses a critical need for a TBI detection device that can be used quickly, with little to no specialized training, while warfighters are in the field. The aim is earlier diagnosis and greater operational readiness.
How ODIN™ Works
ODIN™ is a portable eye-tracking platform being built to go wherever care happens. During a short series of visual tasks, it measures how the eyes follow moving targets and jump between points, and how the pupils respond to light. Machine-learning models then turn those measurements into results designed to be easy for any healthcare professional to interpret.
“Eye movements and pupil responses draw on networks across the brain. That makes them a valuable, objective window into brain function after an injury,” said Michael Noon, CTO of Odin Diagnostics, “Working with NHRC helps us design ODIN™ for the environments where service members need it.”
ODIN™ is an investigational device and has not been cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
From Capstone to CRADA
Odin Diagnostics began in 2023 as Heffler’s senior capstone project at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he also played Division I football as an inside linebacker. Since relocating to San Diego in 2025, Heffler and his team have been building out of EvoNexus San Diego. Beyond military medicine, Odin Diagnostics is developing ODIN™ for emergency medicine and athletics.
Odin Diagnostics has been featured on FOX 5 San Diego and ESPN+.
▶ Watch on FOX 5 San Diego: Former Saintsman creates VR headsets to detect concussions
A Road Rory Moore Knows Well
EvoNexus CEO and co-founder Rory Moore has seen this play out before. In 1990, he founded Peregrine Semiconductor with Ron Reedy and Mark Burgener, two researchers from the Naval Ocean Systems Center on Point Loma. Moore provided the seed capital and served as the company’s first CFO.
In 1991, barely five years after Congress created the CRADA, Peregrine signed one with the Naval Ocean Systems Center to commercialize the silicon-on-sapphire chip technology developed there. Peregrine went on to ship billions of chips that ended up in everything from the iPhone to a NASA Mars rover. It went public in 2012 and is now pSemi, a Murata company.
Thirty-five years later, another San Diego startup is working with another Navy lab on Point Loma.
“When we signed Peregrine’s CRADA in 1991, there wasn’t much of a playbook for a startup working side by side with a Navy lab,” said Rory Moore, CEO of EvoNexus. “That collaboration helped turn Navy research into billions of chips. Watching Connor and the Odin Diagnostics team build their own relationship with NHRC is a full-circle moment, and exactly what EvoNexus is here for.”
Congratulations to the entire Odin Diagnostics team on this milestone.
This collaboration does not constitute an endorsement of Odin Diagnostics or any product or service by the Naval Health Research Center or the Department of the Navy.
About Odin Diagnostics:
Odin Diagnostics is a San Diego medical technology company developing ODIN™, an AI-powered eye-tracking platform for rapid, objective concussion assessment in emergency and urgent care, athletics, and military operational medicine. ODIN™ is an investigational device. It has not been cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is currently offered for research use only. Learn more at odin-diagnostics.com.
About EvoNexus:
EvoNexus is California’s leading nonprofit technology startup incubator, with locations in San Diego and Irvine. Since its formation in 2010, EvoNexus has successfully built 291 companies with an exceptional survival rate of over 85%, with portfolio companies securing over $2.4B in cumulative venture funding, backed by a network of more than 400 venture capital and independent investors, and achieving 63 acquisitions alongside a successful IPO, with additional public market exits on the horizon and over $6 billion in pre-exit valuations.
Backed by an elite network of global corporate partners, including Irvine Company, Qualcomm, AMD, BAE Systems, Viasat, ResMed, LG, Murata Manufacturing, and EMD Electronics, EvoNexus continues to drive massive economic impact across Southern California’s innovation economy, culminating in a record-breaking year with $619M raised for the portfolio in 2025 alone.