InspectAR Augmented Interfaces Inc., a St. John’s tech company less than two years old, has been acquired by Silicon Valley-based Cadence Design Systems for an undisclosed price.

The Newfoundland company, which has strong links to Northern California, issued a press release on Wednesday saying it is now part of Cadence. The statement described the California company as the market leader in electronic design automation, or EDA, software and services.

“InspectAR will continue to grow and operate independently from our headquarters in St. John’s, Newfoundland,” said the statement.

The St. John’s company was formed in early 2019 by a team of graduates of the Memorial University of Newfoundland engineering faculty. InspectAR uses augmented reality to help electrical engineers and electronics technicians to quickly assess and improve the state of the printed circuit board, or PCB, that they’re working on. Its software can inspect, debug and rework a PCB, while assisting with assembly and collaboration.

The team uses augmented reality to assess the state of circuit boards and make it easier for hardware producers to work with them.

Earlier this year, the young company said it had raised $850,000 from two American companies and intended to double its staff of seven through 2020.

“For the past 1.5 years, InspectAR has been on a tear, adding immense value to hardware teams and engineers around the world,” said the most recent statement. “We’ve amassed thousands of users, teamed up with some of the biggest names in the industry, and built some of the most innovative technology to really bring a new lens into the hardware development space — and we’re just getting started.”

The company added that the acquisition would be good for its customers. InspectAR intends to continue keeping the platform entirely “vendor-agnostic”, and to add support for even more EDA software and lab tools in the near future.

Based in San Jose, Calif., Cadence Design has specialized in electronic design for more than 30 years, employs more than 8,000 people, and in 2019 had sales of more than US$2.3 billion. The company says it applies its underlying intelligent system design strategy to deliver software, hardware and IP that turn design concepts into reality.

InspectAR CEO Mihir Shah has a family background in PCBs as his father Milan Shah is the owner of circuit-board manufacturer Royal Circuits, based in Salinas, Calif. The early adopters include Royal Circuit and a Colorado company it partners with, Advanced Assembly. They were impressed enough with the product that they became investors.

Shah has been working in Northern California while the development team has been based in St. John’s.

The InspectAR exit is the latest example of a wave of good news for the St. John’s tech community in the past two years. Such companies as Mysa Smart Thermostats and Oliver POS have announced multi-million-dollar funding rounds in the past few months, in spite of the pandemic. Last year, Verafin raised a Canadian record $515 million in growth capital, and Colab Software and Sequence Bio became the only Atlantic Canadian companies ever accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator in Silicon Valley.