Jed Nilson, Chief Business Development Officer

Jed Nilson is chief business development officer at Neurova Labs. He is also co-founder and president of Nilson Homes, a homebuilder that has been putting up houses along the Wasatch Front for decades, and he was one of the first people to put money into Neurova Labs. The advice that led to the role arrived years before the title did.

The advice Jed Nilson gave at a pitch event

Brenden Borrowman, our chief executive and co-founder, was pitching at a Warrior Rising event in downtown Salt Lake City. The format was a shark tank: 15 stations, two minutes a pitch, four judges at every table. He worked through six of them and got almost nothing back.

Then he sat down at Jed's table. Jed leaned in, took the full five minutes and asked questions about how the thing would actually reach people. His advice was specific, and it ran against what the room expected a veteran-founded neurotechnology company to do. Stop leading with federal and government sales. Find a commercial partner first.

Craig Cooper, our president and co-founder, kept his notes from that night. The commercial path Neurova Labs is on now traces back to those notes.

Why a homebuilder was the right person

Homebuilding is capital-intensive, slow and local. A builder carries land and materials for months before a dollar comes back. Every municipality has its own approvals, every lender its own terms, and a market 40 miles up the road behaves differently from the one at home. Nothing about the business can be mandated from a central office, and a builder who forgets that finds out quickly.

That is close to the structure of the problem in front of Neurova Labs. Every YMCA association is independently operated and makes its own purchasing decisions. Every clinic, treatment program and fire department buys on its own terms, with its own budget cycle and its own approvals. A company selling into that cannot run one campaign and wait. It has to prove the thing works with one serious partner and then give the next buyer a template.

Jed had spent a career in a business built that way, which is why the advice carried beyond the pitch sessions.

Plain City, and the approvals behind 275 homes

The Salt Lake Tribune reported Oct. 10 on what that looks like in practice. Jed's company is building JDC Ranch in Plain City, and after Gov. Spencer Cox set a state goal of 35,000 new starter homes by the end of 2028, Jed reworked the plans to grow the project from 725 homes to 1,000. The 275 starter homes added to it are priced below $450,000, sit on smaller lots and carry the same finishes and craftsmanship as the market-rate houses around them, so they do not read as a separate tier of the neighborhood.

Getting them approved took months. Local officials hesitated, in part over how a run of smaller houses would meet the street, and the design answer came out of older Utah neighborhoods, the Avenues and Sugar House among them. Reported by somebody other than us, that is the clearest illustration of the argument above. The work is won one municipality at a time, in a room where the objection is specific and local, and no amount of head-office strategy settles it.

One detail in that story earns its place here for a second reason. Preferred applicants at JDC Ranch, including first responders and active-duty military, get a two-week window to buy before the homes open to everyone else. Neurova Labs had no hand in that and takes no credit for it. The people it puts first are the people our own work is built around, which says something about where the advice came from.

The commercial path that followed

The YMCA of Orange County took the partner role. It piloted a small-group program in two of its own branches, run by its own coordinators, and it brought that program to the General Assembly of YMCAs in New Orleans. The program is Brain+. It belongs to the Y, it runs in the Y's voice and Neurova Labs is the technology that powers it.

That arrangement is the template Jed argued for, and it is the one being carried into clinics, treatment programs, employers and first responder organizations now.

Nilson Homes, and brain health

Nilson Homes runs Neurova Academy for its employees.

Readers should have the full picture. Jed is an officer of Neurova Labs and an early investor in it, so Nilson Homes is not an arm's-length customer reference, and we are not presenting it as one. We report no results, no figures and no outcomes from that site, and nothing about it should be read as evidence that the program does anything for anyone. It is a company led by a Neurova Labs officer that uses the Neurova Labs program.

We say this plainly because a reader who found the relationship on their own would be right to wonder why we had not.

The template, and where it goes

The argument Jed made at that table has not changed. Prove it with a partner who takes it seriously, learn what the delivery actually requires, then hand the next organization something they can run without rebuilding it. A fire department, a clinic, a community organization and an employer each need their own conversation, and each needs a program that fits the day they already have.

That is the work in front of him.

Partnership and channel inquiries reach Jed through nathaniel.free@neurovalabs.com.

Neurova Academy is a general wellness and cognitive training program. It is not a medical device and is not offered to diagnose, treat, cure, or mitigate any disease or condition, including concussion, traumatic brain injury, or CTE. Outcomes described reflect observational pilot findings and individual experience, and are not a prediction of results for anyone else. Individual results vary.