activate-fellow
(5)
Tina Boville
Tina Boville is the co-founder and CEO of Aralez Bio, a Berkeley-based biotechnology company using directed evolution to make noncanonical amino acids - the building blocks behind a growing share of modern medicines. A biochemist trained at the University of Colorado and Caltech, where she worked in Nobel laureate Frances Arnold's lab, Boville turned an engineered enzyme platform into a company that can produce over 100 amino acids in single-step reactions, cutting manufacturing waste by up to 99%. She has been named to MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, is an Activate Fellow, and in 2024 raised a $12 million Series A to scale production to tons per year.
Nishita Deka
Nishita Deka is the co-founder and CEO of Sonera, a Berkeley deep-tech company building chip-scale biomagnetic sensors that read the body's magnetic fields. Trained as a semiconductor-device physicist at USC and UC Berkeley, she partnered with PhD colleague Dominic Labanowski in 2018 to commercialize a room-temperature magnetic sensor that strips brain and muscle imaging of its supercooled, room-sized hardware. Sonera's first product, the S1 chip, brings magnetomyography out of the lab and toward wearables, gaming, AR, prosthetics, and silent-speech interfaces. The company has raised about $20 million and works with partners including the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
Ryan DuChanois
Ryan DuChanois is the co-founder and CEO of Solidec, a Houston climate-tech startup that spun out of Rice University in 2024. Solidec builds modular reactors that pull molecules from air and water and, using only electricity, make industrial chemicals like hydrogen peroxide on-site - no centralized plants, no long supply chains, no carbon-heavy inputs. A Gates Cambridge Scholar with a Yale PhD and 20 peer-reviewed papers in membrane science, DuChanois traded the academic bench for the factory floor, aiming to abate over a gigaton of carbon emissions a year by reinventing how the world's chemicals are made.
Steven Jepeal
Steven Jepeal is the co-founder and CEO of Allium Engineering, a Massachusetts deeptech startup making bridges last 100 years instead of 30. An MIT nuclear-engineering PhD who once worked on fusion reactor materials, Jepeal pivoted from the physics of plasma to the unglamorous economics of rebar, inventing a way to clad ordinary steel reinforcing bar in a thin layer of stainless so it stops rusting. The trick: the process slots into existing steel mills without changing how they operate. Allium's clad rebar is already in bridges in California and Florida, and Jepeal was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Manufacturing & Industry.
Jared O'Leary
Jared O'Leary is the Co-Founder and CEO of SirenOpt, a deep-tech startup commercializing PlasmaSens - a manufacturing intelligence platform that uses cold atmospheric plasma and AI to perform real-time, non-destructive materials characterization. A Stanford Chemical Engineering graduate with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, O'Leary spun SirenOpt out of his doctoral research with advisor Professor Ali Mesbah in 2022. The platform can generate 213,000 data points per measurement in milliseconds without destroying the sample, targeting battery manufacturing, aerospace, semiconductors, and other advanced manufacturing sectors. SirenOpt has raised $16.1M total, including a $6.5M strategic round led by Hitachi Ventures and JLR's InMotion Ventures in 2025, plus a $2.4M California Energy Commission BRIDGE grant for battery electrode applications.