A subsidiary of Chinese optics manufacturer Guangzhou Bosma Corp. has invested $500,000 in Halifax’s 4-Deep Inwater Imaging, expanding the microscope-maker’s R&D and distribution capacity.

The companies said in a statement today that Bosma USA will invest in the Halifax company and that the two companies will establish a joint research and development facility in Silicon Valley.

Bosma is best known for making telescopes and binoculars and wants to use 4-Deep’s product to check the precision of its curved glass lenses. The Chinese company, based just north of Hong Kong, has about 1,100 sales channels in Greater China and will become the distributor of 4Deep’s products in China, Hong Kong and Macau.

Formerly known as Resolution Optics, 4-Deep manufactures and sells powerful electronic microscopes, and focuses on those that operate under underwater. They allow researchers or industrial users to monitor microscopic articles in the water without having to take samples back to a laboratory.

A Good Year in Follow-on Funding

“It’s a smart investment and they fully appreciate what we’re doing here with 4-Deep,” said CEO Stephen Jones in an interview in his Halifax office. He added that the funding will allow 4-Deep to tap other sources of capital so it will raise a total funding round, including debt, of about $1 million.

“It will finally allow us to hire some people,” he said. The company now employs four people in Halifax and one in Russia, and plans to hire three employees in 2016.

The Halifax company said Bosma’s expertise in optical manufacturing will help to enhance “4Deep’s core proprietary digital holographic technology for the purpose of quality control for large-scale, optics manufacturing.”

In the statement, Jones said the Chinese market “suits our technology perfectly and will no doubt push the limits of innovation and creativity, and generate some exciting products in the next year or two.”

He said the focus of the Halifax team will continue to be enhancing and promoting the submersible microscope for real-time water quality applications. The company has just signed a research agreement with Dalhousie University to collect marine algae images that will be used to develop a Deep Neural Network based automatic recognition software.

The statement also said that 4Deep will also launch a new submersible florescence microscope.

Dalhousie University professors Manfred Jericho and H. Juergen Kreuzer founded 4Deep in 2008 with the goal of making submersible and desktop microscopes producing real-time “4D” images of particles and micro-organisms, meaning the devices show them from three angles as they move over time.

The company raised $125,000 in equity financing from private investors in late 2013, and leveraged the investment with additional funds from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and others.

In 2014, 4Deep was the only Atlantic Canadian company to make Deloitte’s “Companies to Watch in Canada” list, Jones was a finalist in the 2014 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Atlantic awards.