wearable-sensors
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Bill Near
Bill Near is the founder and CEO of HELIOS, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire sports-technology company that turns hockey development into something you can actually measure. An MIT engineer who captained the school's hockey team, Near pairs an AI-powered sensor that clips to a player's shoulder pads with automated shift video so any skater - youth to pro - can see real numbers on stride speed, acceleration and effort. He built the company in 2018 alongside Hall of Famer Ron Francis, and in October 2025 raised a $2.2M seed round from a syndicate of active NHL executives and players to scale it.
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.
Steve Xu
Steve Xu is a board-certified dermatologist turned medtech founder who runs Sibel Health, the Chicago company commercializing ICU-grade wearable sensors that now monitor patients in more than 20 countries. A physician-engineer trained at Rice, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, he splits his life between the clinic, the lab at Northwestern's Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics, and a startup chasing a single line: Better Health Data for All.