The Commission’s published non-confidential summary states that Apple acquires certain assets and hires certain employees; the corporate entity itself is not part of the transaction, making this an asset purchase combined with an acqui-hire. The summary is written in the future tense, and an Article 14 notification concerns an intended concentration, so 8 May 2026 is the notification date rather than the closing date, which has not been made public. The Commission describes the target in a single line as a company developing a chip-based magnetic sensor.
Since Apple was designated a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, every acquisition it makes in the digital sector must be notified to the Commission regardless of whether it meets the thresholds of the EU Merger Regulation. AppleInsider reported the deal first on 8 September 2026, with the French site Consomac providing more detailed primary information the same day, followed by wider trade coverage.
Sonera, formerly Sonera Magnetics, was founded in 2018 in Berkeley, California, and spun out of the University of California, Berkeley. Its co-founders include chief executive Nishita Deka and chief technology officer Dominic Labanowski, and listings commonly add Labanowski’s doctoral adviser, IEEE Fellow Sayeef Salahuddin. The company closed an 11 million US dollar seed round in September 2023 led by Amplify Partners, bringing total funding to roughly 20 million US dollars.
Its technology is an acoustically driven ferromagnetic resonance magnetic sensor, measuring the magnetic field produced by currents in the body rather than surface potentials on the skin. It operates at room temperature without cryogenic cooling or a magnetically shielded room. Related patents include US11740192B2, US12366618B2 and US12287383B2, the last covering a low-power acoustically driven ferromagnetic resonance sensor array. Public materials list the S1 chip’s applications as prosthetic control, neuromuscular status monitoring, disease biomarker discovery and athletic performance tracking, in target form factors including watches, glasses, earbuds and rings.
The Sonera team’s preprint, Silent Speech Recognition with Wearable Magnetometers, was posted to bioRxiv on 4 August 2025 and updated on 29 September 2025, with all ten authors affiliated to Sonera Inc., including both co-founders. It reports that magnetometers embedded in a headphone form factor achieve 86% per-user silent speech recognition accuracy, which the authors describe as significantly outperforming previously reported wearable headphones combining electrophysiological signals with inertial measurement units; those recordings were made in a magnetically shielded room. The team also built a necklace form factor, tested in ambient conditions in a typical office setting, able to decode both silent and overt speech. Silent speech here means participants mouthed the words without vocalization.
The preprint states that the magnetometers read mechanical muscle vibration, that is mechanomyography, together with electrical muscle activity, that is magnetomyography. The authors write that this captures biosignals at the source of articulation, directly measuring the neuromuscular activity that drives silent speech. Neuromuscular activity refers to the muscle end of the pathway after nerves deliver their commands, which is not the same as neuronal firing inside the skull. The paper lists the absence of any need for skin contact as the main advantage of magnetometers over electrophysiological approaches, and notes that surface electromyography electrode arrays perform poorly in hair-covered regions.
BCIwiki queried the DNS records for sonera.io on 8 September 2026. The domain registration remains active and its name servers still respond, but no A record is returned for the apex domain, the www subdomain does not exist, and the company homepage does not load. This is the result of a single DNS query and is not sufficient to conclude that the transaction has closed. Public filings say nothing about the future of the Sonera corporate entity.