# Sonera

> Sonera (Sonera Magnetics) is a Berkeley, California deep-tech company building chip-scale magnetic field sensors that read the body's own biomagnetic signals without touching the skin. Its flagship S1 chip performs magnetic muscle sensing (magnetomyography) at room temperature and in wearable form factors, aiming to make neural and neuromuscular data as easy to capture as a heart rate. Applications range from silent-speech interfaces in earbuds and glasses to gesture control for XR, plus clinical uses like portable brain imaging and neurodegenerative biomarker tracking. Spun out of UC Berkeley research and backed by an $11M seed round, Sonera is turning a lab-grade magnetics breakthrough into a scalable sensing platform.

- **Founded:** 2018
- **Headquarters:** Berkeley, California, United States
- **Founders:** Nishita Deka (Co-Founder & CEO), Dominic Labanowski (Co-Founder & CTO), Sayeef Salahuddin (Co-Founder (Scientific), UC Berkeley professor & IEEE Fellow)
- **Team size:** ~13 employees
- **Products:** S1 chip, Magnetic muscle sensing (MMG) platform, Silent speech interface, Portable magnetic brain sensing
- **Notable:** Exited stealth in September 2023 with an $11M seed round., Developed room-temperature, shield-free magnetic sensing using acoustically driven ferromagnetic resonance - a modality that traditionally required cryogenic cooling to -270C., Demonstrated silent speech recognition at up to 86% per-user accuracy with magnetometers in a headphone form factor, outperforming prior ExG+IMU wearables.

## Products & services

- **S1 chip** — A tiny magnetic field sensor chip that performs magnetic muscle sensing (magnetomyography) non-invasively, without direct skin contact, enabling high-fidelity neuromuscular signal capture in wearable form factors like earbuds, glasses, necklaces, and smartwatches.
- **Magnetic muscle sensing (MMG) platform** — A sensing modality that reads the magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in muscle and nerve activity, less sensitive to surface variability than electrode-based EMG/ExG systems.
- **Silent speech interface** — Wearable magnetometer configurations (headphone and necklace form factors) that decode silent and overt speech from facial and neuromuscular activity, demonstrated at up to 86% per-user accuracy.
- **Portable magnetic brain sensing** — Room-temperature, shield-free magnetometry based on acoustically driven ferromagnetic resonance, aimed at making magnetoencephalography-class brain imaging affordable and portable.

## Achievements

- Exited stealth in September 2023 with an $11M seed round.
- Developed room-temperature, shield-free magnetic sensing using acoustically driven ferromagnetic resonance - a modality that traditionally required cryogenic cooling to -270C.
- Demonstrated silent speech recognition at up to 86% per-user accuracy with magnetometers in a headphone form factor, outperforming prior ExG+IMU wearables.
- Published peer-review-track research on silent speech recognition with wearable magnetometers (bioRxiv, 2025).
- Featured in IEEE Spectrum for portable, affordable high-performance brain imaging.

## Latest updates

- **2025-08** — Published research on silent speech recognition with wearable magnetometers, reporting up to 86% per-user accuracy and a necklace form factor decoding silent and overt speech in ambient conditions.
- **2025-01** — Launched 'The Magnetic Moment,' a company talk series highlighting magnetics and neurotech.
- **2023-09** — Exited stealth with an $11M seed round led by Amplify Partners to scale its neural sensing chip technology.

## Links

- Website: https://sonera.io
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sonera-mag
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/SoneraMagnetics
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soneramagnetics/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/sonera
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Last updated: 2026-07-02