Startup Candidate.Guru inked on Wednesday a funding agreement that could yield it as much as 10 times more additional capital.

Based in Boca Raton, Candidate.Guru combines big data and predictive analytics to help employers hire candidates that are a cultural fit and cut costs brought on by mismatched hiring. The specifics of the funding deal signed this week have been kept hush-hush, but the other party, The Florida Institute for the Commercialization of Public Research, shed some light.

The Florida Institute, through its Florida Technology Seed Capital Fund, invests in qualified companies alongside private matching investors, said Jane Teague, Florida Institute's chief operating officer. The nonprofit can invest or match up to $300,000 in financing, with its money coming from the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity and donors.

"Overall, funded companies have leveraged Institute funding to raise 5-10X's or more in private investment capital," Teague wrote in an email.

Sixty-five companies have been funded to date, all eligible for investment per certain criteria, such as commercializing technology based on research conducted at a Florida university or research institute. In Candidate.Guru's case, its HR software was created at the Florida Institute for Human Machine and Cognition in Ocala.

The idea behind the company came to CEO Chris Daniels because of personal experience in the field of recruiting.

"Prior to Candidate.Guru, the only way a company would know whether job applicants were a culture fit was to speak with all of them, which isn't realistic for companies that get hundreds, if not thousands of job applicants," said Daniels, a former executive recruiter.

Studies show that 60 percent of new hires who voluntarily leave a new job do so because of a mismatch with their manager, costing the company the equivalent of 2.5 times the candidate’s salary in lost productivity. With Candidate.Guru, companies can submit job candidates and have them returned in rank order based on strength of the culture fit with a specific hiring manager, team or the company itself, helping companies to prioritize which candidates to reach out to first.

"Candidate.Guru is improving the hiring process by enabling companies to hire the best candidates more efficiently, thereby increasing long term employee productivity," said Florida Institute CEO Jackson Streeter. "The Institute looks forward to supporting Candidate.Guru as the company provides companies with the tools they need to build world-class teams."

Founded in 2014, Candidate.Guru has raised more than $2 million to date.

Debora Lima covers technology, startups, biotech and transportation. Get the latest tech news with our free daily newsletter. Click here to subscribe