Yektasonics Selected to Participate in Santa Cruz Accelerates 5th Cohort

Santa Cruz Works is excited to share more about the startups that have been accepted into the 5th cohort of our Santa Cruz Accelerates Program. Check out our Newsletter and News section of our website to read all about the startups!

TEAM

  • Navid Gougol (CEO/Founder, former chip designer at AMD & Sun, Univ of California PhD studies, Stanford, USC, Univ of Tehran)

  • Ambrose Liu (Mechanical Lead, UC Berkeley graduate, Boeing, Applied Materials)

  • Balaram Behera (Software Lead, GA Tech graduate 4.0/4.0, UCSC)

  • Ray Huang (software consultant, Facebook, Amazon, GA Tech CS 4.0/4.0). 

  • Laiy Joshi (Graphics Lead, UCSC, CORE grantee)

Advisors:

  • Prof. Donald Wiberg (UCLA emeritus, IEEE fellow, Legislative Assistant to Sen. Tom Harkin, D-IA)

  • Prof. Ali Niknejad (UC Berkeley full professor, Serial Entrepreneur, JSSCC Jack Kilby award)

  • Dr. Walt Frollof (Lawyer, Inventor, UC Berkeley Engineering)

Company Summary

Yektasonics introduces highly cost-effective and superior performance ultrasound driving systems: Power Modules and Phased Arrays. The technology is a core building block of a wide range of medical and non-medical applications. We have launched our Power Modules successfully.

In medicine, Focused Ultrasound (FUS) or “curing with sounds” is a revolutionary non-invasive medical therapy, which treats over 170 medical conditions, this number has increased 4 times in the past four years. It is being used for cancer therapy, with no chemotherapy or surgery and brain conditions without opening the skull, to name a few. Our technology is in the interest of medical and non-medical companies, due to our price offering and our performance. 

Yektasonics Power Module

Our technology drives transducers (responsible for the generation of acoustic waves) with high amount of power, with fine phase and power control, in scalable channel count, compact size, no need for matching networks, in a highly cost-effective fashion, and harmonic free or pure sine signals.

We plan to introduce an ultrasonic brain modulator for brain treatment. FUS has shown capabilities to focus in mm-sized brain regions for neuron stimulation and inhibition. We received a grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the brain opportunity.  

We are the best of the best in the industry and academia, with our roots from our original UC Berkeley research a few years ago. We are supported by the University of California to continue our R&D with no IP compromise.

“It is the right opportunity and the right time to be part of Santa Cruz Work Accelerator here in beautiful Santa Cruz!”-Navid Gougol, CEO/Founder of Yektasonics