Fierce Electronics proudly announces the sixth group of four honorees in the inaugural 40 Under 40 awards program. These awards are timed with the 40th anniversary of Sensors Converge being held June 24-26 in Santa Clara, CA.
The Fierce Electronics 40 Under 40 recognizes individuals under 40 who are driving advancements in technology, pushing boundaries and shaping the future of electronics with their creativity, expertise and impact. Additional honorees will be named weekly in Fierce Electronics in no particular order.
The entire class will honored at Sensors Converge 2025, celebrating its 40th anniversary June 24-26 in Santa Clara, CA.
Charlotte Savage
Age 33
Founder and CIO
HaiLa Technologies
Charlotte Savage founded HaiLa in 2017 and became CIO in 2020. She is a passionate advocate for finding ways to use ambient energy and backscatter for millions of IoT devices to eventually reduce the number of batteries dumped into landfills. A recent demonstration by HaiLa of Bluetooth backscatter will enable smaller IoT batteries and use of a single battery over a product’s life. She was earlier chosen to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Board and accepted the Best of Sensors Rising Star of the Year and HaiLa for Startup of the Year in 2024. She left Concordia University while studying mechanical engineering in her final year to start HaiLa.
Karan Gill
Age 34
Advanced Hardware Engineer
Zoox
Karan Gill has played a significant role in implementing advanced technologies that contribute to the architecture, design, development, and validation of high-performance compute and sensor systems for autonomous vehicles. He was a key contributor to NIO’s second-generation hardware platform, where he helped design the 1000TOPS ADAS system, high-resolution cameras, and driver monitoring technologies. His expertise extends to researching next-generation sensor, compute, and networking technologies to drive innovation in the field.Karan joined Zoox in 2023 where he is helping teams solve complex problems to enable higher levels of autonomy with enhanced safety. Earlier, he was co-founder and CEO of Annofy.
Toon Purnal
Senior Product Security Analyst
PQShield
Age 29
Dr. Toon Purnal, a Senior Product Security Analyst at PQShield, is a leader in cybersecurity. He excels in microarchitectural attacks and post-quantum cryptography, driving quantum-safe solutions for chips, applications, and the cloud. At PQShield, he contributed to the first NIST post-quantum cryptography standards and fixed critical security flaws, like the "clangover" leak in ML-KEM. His impactful research, published in top conferences such as IEEE S&P and ACM CCS, stems from his PhD at KU Leuven’s COSIC lab, where he graduated in the top 5%. Awarded a FWO grant, Toon’s work bridges academia and industry, with prior roles at Intel Labs and National Chiao Tung University. He’s securing today’s tech while shaping a post-quantum future.
Kunal Bajaj
Age 36
Sensor Lead
Stealth Startup
Kunal Bajaj is a hardware engineer and manager of multi-disciplinary engineering teams. He has 12-plus years defining product requirements, rapid prototyping, hardware architecture, design validation, NPI, yield attack and failure analysis. He has been involved in shipping six consumer electronics and seven enterprise products. He aspires to build robust hardware engineering practices for new product development and sustaining shipped products. Previously, he was at Yohana, Standard AI and Arable. He holds an MS in robotic systems development from Carnegie Mellon University.