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.

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.