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.