Soctera’s market-beating result—and the build phase that follows.
Soctera (Austin Hickman, Cohort 2022) envisions powering the future of wireless communications by solving one of 5G’s biggest problems: heat build-up in radiofrequency equipment. In April 2025, Soctera took a major step toward making this vision a reality.
For the first time, Soctera’s innovative power amplifier outperformed products on the market with double the power density, unlocking twice the signal coverage, faster data rates, 20 percent energy savings, and 20 times less demand for gallium, an increasingly scarce mineral.
This breakthrough was seven years in the making. Soctera co-founders Austin Hickman and Reet Chaudhuri had begun to rethink semiconductor technology as graduate students in electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University. They had a hunch they could solve thermal management issues in radio units with a combination of gallium nitride and aluminum nitride, and spent several more years working to prove it, co-founding Soctera as Ph.D. students in 2020. Austin became Soctera’s first employee in 2021 and an Activate Fellow in 2022.
While investing years of technical development in the lab, Austin was simultaneously building Soctera from the ground up. He initially fabricated Soctera’s devices himself, functioning as a team of one, before he was able to hire a nanofabrication engineer and Reet rejoined the team as CTO.
As the technology matured, so did the company. Leading up to 2026, Soctera had landed $3.6M in grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Army, U.S. Airforce, and CHIPS-related programs supporting the commercialization of breakthrough research.
After years of scaling from lab R&D to commercial manufacturing, Soctera reached a milestone in September 2025: the Trailblazer wafer. This launch represented the first time Soctera’s power amplifiers were produced at full commercial scale. Now, the full-time team of three is closer than ever to deploying its products and is looking to VC funding in order to double its staff and launch into commercial production.
We caught up with Austin about this exciting next step and to reflect on his journey leading Soctera so far.
What was it like finally achieving the performance milestone you needed to move your technology from the lab to commercial reality?
It was this amazing moment. I was making all these phone calls like “here's the data, here's the data!”
I had tried to demonstrate it for four years as a graduate student. I went through the first year of Soctera, then got into Activate, and wanted to do it by the end of the fellowship in July 2024. We still didn't do it. It wasn't until April 2025 when we finally saw the performance that we knew was necessary to beat out the incumbent technology.
I think that one of the hardest parts about doing a startup is, like the expression, “building the plane as you're flying it,” right? In our case, it was trying to set everything up so that hopefully all of it converges. That was a real challenge for me mentally, especially coming from a Ph.D. where you focus so much on performance.
Why is this a critical moment for Soctera?
For the first four years of Soctera, we've been successful in non-dilutive grants, and that has been able to support our team of three full-time employees with interns along the way. So that’s been necessary for the growth of the company from the stage it was at when we started, which just required so much technical development, development of the supply chain, and transitioning everything we're doing in a lab setting, each component, to a commercial production facility.
The Soctera team presenting at IMS 2025. Image taken from Soctera's LinkedIn.
Now we are very close to producing products—and we've also hit a wall. My CTO, especially, is wearing three or four hats right now, I'm wearing multiple hats, and as a team, we are juggling many roles that could each be additional full-time positions.
We’ve reached an inflection point. Would an influx of more capital accelerate the company? For a long time the answer was no, but now the answer is yes. And so that's what allowed us to make the decision to transition from pursuing further grants and staying on that path to going the VC route so that we can quickly double the size of the team and really transition from an R&D company to a product company.
How has your vision for Soctera evolved?
The name Soctera stands for “system-on-chip terahertz”—“system on chip” meaning a ton of different electrical components all integrated on the same chip, and then “terahertz” meaning very high frequency.
With that grand vision as our starting point, we asked ourselves “What do we really need to do to get to market?” We homed in on a minimum product and made a concrete plan for how we were going to build a successful company.
I've been pleasantly surprised that we've been able to start thinking again about not just the minimum viable product, which is our priority and remains our priority now, but what comes next after our initial product of the power amplifier. How do we continue to expand and incorporate other technologies that we were originally developing in the lab with as grad students? How do those fit into the five- and 10-year timelines that we just talked about for the company? How can we serve a variety of other markets as well?
How did you discover Activate, especially as part of the first Anywhere cohort?
Activate was sent to me in my inbox. Somebody saw it and thought that we would be a good fit.
As soon as I read through the Activate website, I just knew it was exactly what I personally needed to grow into the CEO role.
It was also the perfect program for the stage we were at with Soctera. So that's why I applied, and I was fortunate to be accepted into the first Anywhere cohort.
What milestone would have taken longer without Activate?
I remember convincing myself that I could balance splitting my time between being in the lab and running the company. I didn’t have the conviction to start the hiring process, which was something that I needed to do. I think it was Calvin who told me, “If you think that way, you're never going to hire anybody.” So I ended up making the hire, and then the second, of course, now we're getting so much more done.
Growing the company was guided and absolutely accelerated by Activate. I got so much advice from my MD and a variety of other Activate Fellows about how to execute that process and develop the culture of the company as well.
What’s something you changed your perspective on during the fellowship?
The importance of having a company culture was something I didn’t recognize as an engineer. My instinct was to say, “We don’t need that,” but now I've done a complete 180. Company culture and a clear established identity for the startup are absolutely critical. Our company values inform literally every scenario.
What advice would you give someone standing where you were when you first applied to Activate?
It may sound cliché, but the thing that withstands time, whether in the Activate Fellowship or grad school or whatever situation, is the relationships you form with the individual people. My advice for current or future Activate Fellows is not to see it as a two-year thing, but as a community—if you invest in it, it will continue to serve you well after the fellowship ends, and you can help others, too. I’m a year and a half beyond the fellowship, and I still find myself participating in the Activate community on a regular basis.