Sonita Lontoh

Lontoh was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia. She moved to the United States to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering and operations research. After several years of working, she re-entered school for a Master of Engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

In the late 1990s, Lontoh and two Berkeley classmates founded an online game company. Their original plan was to create a Greater China-focused Yahoo!, then a successful search engine in the United States, but quickly realized that online advertising was still nascent in the Chinese market. Facing this challenge, they decided to pivot to the gaming market, which their research showed was a quickly growing segment particularly among young males. This change proved successful, and they sold the company for a profit a few years later.

After a break for graduate school, Lontoh took on several roles in the energy industry. These included the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), where she focused on green energy and renewables, Trilliant, and Siemens, where she was an executive within the new digital grid division.

After Siemens, from 2018 to 2022, Lontoh was a senior executive in HP Inc.'s Personalization, 3D Printing, and Digital Manufacturing division. In 2021, she was elected to join the board of directors of Sunrun, a renewable energy company, and the workforce solutions company TrueBlue. Lontoh serves on the industry advisory board of UC Berkeley College of Engineering's Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. She is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors. Additionally, Lontoh is an advisor for the venture capital firm Sway Ventures.