Apple no longer publicly announces its acquisitions. Instead, the company reveals its purchases through the acquisition register required by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a European regulation that compels large tech firms to disclose their purchases to authorities in Brussels. The register, updated recently, included a quiet entry: Sonera, a small startup based in Berkeley, California, was acquired "earlier this year." The purchase price remains confidential, as is typical for such deals. Most people will not recognize the name Sonera, and that is expected—Sonera has never sold any products. The company was founded in 2018 by two doctoral students from the University of California, Berkeley, Nishita Deka and Dominic Labanowski, who later brought on Professor Sayeef Salahuddin. Their goal is to measure the tiny magnetic fields produced by nerves and muscles, rather than the electrical signals detected by traditional methods like electroencephalograms. The benefit of this approach is that magnetic fields can pass through skin and bone without weakening, allowing sensors to read them without touching the body. In the past, such measurements required expensive and bulky machines cooled with liquid helium, typically found in hospitals. Sonera claims to have developed a way to perform these measurements using a chip that works at room temperature. Their first product, called the S1 chip, is designed to read muscle activity and control an interface using finger movements without actual physical movement. This could lead to a chip for the Apple Watch, offering a competitive edge against Meta, which currently uses electrodes to read muscle activity. Sonera had raised a total of $20 million in funding, including $11 million in 2023 from venture capital firms such as Amplify Partners, Spark Capital, and Material Impact. The company had a small team of about 15 employees. One of its notable investors is Josh Duyan, co-founder of CTRL-Labs, a neural interface startup acquired by Meta in 2019 and now integrated into Meta's Neural Band, which comes with Ray-Ban Display glasses. While Apple has not officially commented on the acquisition, Sonera has mentioned potential applications in prosthetics, monitoring neuromuscular diseases, and enhancing sports performance. An Apple Watch that detects gestures before they happen or monitors tremors fits into this vision. At present, Sonera has a research team, a prototype chip, and a patent. Apple has a history of acquiring such technologies years in advance of bringing them to market, often waiting until the technology is mature enough for integration into its products.