Seena Partokia
Biography
Seena Partokia is the founder and CEO of Cenfire, a next-generation MEMS switch company spun out of Atomica. Cenfire recently closed its Seed round and is now raising a Series A to scale commercialization of its solid-state switching platform, which combines ultra-low power consumption, high reliability, and fast switching speeds for demanding applications across automotive, defense, aerospace, and energy storage.
A lifelong obsession with transistors and switches has defined Seena’s path. He began his career working on RF switches using Silicon-on-Sapphire (SOS) and Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technologies, where he gained a deep understanding of device physics and analog performance. He then transitioned into the power semiconductor space, working on high-voltage devices and system-level reliability challenges. That journey led him to Menlo Micro, a MEMS relay company that raised over $230 million, where he contributed to product development and commercialization of MEMS switching technologies.
Throughout his career, Seena has worked exclusively on switches — from RF to power to MEMS — building deep expertise in device design, process integration, and go-to-market strategy. With Cenfire, he’s bringing those experiences together to develop a scalable, robust switching platform designed to replace incumbent relays across industries where size, weight, speed, and reliability matter most.
Company Profile
Cenfire Corporation
Cenfire is unlocking a new era of MEMS switching with an all-silicon platform that leverages the same scalable, proven infrastructure that has powered the semiconductor industry for decades. Built entirely on standard silicon, the technology delivers high-voltage handling, low-loss operation, and fast switching performance comparable to electromechanical relays—without relying on esoteric material sets, exotic fabrication processes, or unscalable design philosophies. Rather than attempting to fabricate complex structures from rare materials, Cenfire uses the most abundant, cost-effective, and industrially mature material on Earth to address the toughest switching challenges in power and signal electronics.
The company’s MEMS relay platform is based on a modular unit cell architecture that can be arrayed in series or parallel to support a wide range of voltage and current requirements. This architecture enables precise, application-specific optimization—combining the speed and longevity of solid-state switches with the galvanic isolation and power-handling capabilities of mechanical relays. Cenfire’s silicon-based MEMS switches are orders of magnitude smaller and faster than traditional relays, with dramatically reduced power consumption and footprint—ideal for compact, high-performance systems.
From aerospace and defense to electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and high-efficiency power converters, Cenfire delivers chip-scale switching performance to markets long limited by the size, speed, and inefficiencies of legacy relay technologies. Like every transformative hardware platform before it, this is the future of switching—built on silicon, again.