Apple bought a startup that reads the brain magnetically

Apple has acquired Sonera, a California company building chip-scale magnetic sensors that detect the fields thrown off by brain and muscle activity. The deal surfaced on 8 September 2026 through a notice in the European Commission’s database of acquisitions by companies designated under the Digital Markets Act, and was reported by MacRumors and AppleInsider. Apple has not commented, and Sonera’s website has gone offline.

According to that reporting, the notice describes an acquisition of certain Sonera assets through an Apple subsidiary, together with employment offers to some of the startup’s staff, in a transaction dated May 2026.

Sonera was founded in 2018 by Nishita Deka and Dominic Labanowski, then at UC Berkeley, and left stealth in 2023 with $11 million. Its pitch was biomagnetic sensing at room temperature and at chip scale: measure magnetic fields rather than electrical potentials, whose advantage, per AppleInsider, is that electrical signals weaken as they pass through the skull. No gel, no electrodes, no skin contact. Sonera’s own 2023 material named prosthetics control, continuous monitoring of neuromuscular conditions, biomarker discovery and sports performance as applications.

The Commission’s own entry could not be read directly for this dispatch, so the filing’s wording rests on the two outlets above.