GeniusHire, a startup founded by a group of masters students in the Biotechnology Innovation and Computation program, has secured first round capital funding value of approximately a million dollars from an undisclosed source.     

After they receive their degrees in May, four co-founders – Kartik Mandaville, Zhenxiang Liang, Mingyang Song and Hank Hwang – will relocate to Santa Monica, Calif., where they plan to turn GeniusHire into a prospering business.               

GeniusHire is designed to expedite the hiring process for highly skilled people, using Big Data analytics and complex machine learning algorithms to mine websites such as Github, Facebook and LinkedIn for potential recruits. It then builds a profile of job candidates, including social activities, circle of friends and articles published in technical publications and personal websites.               

The service will expedite hiring by enabling companies to specify the skills they need and the area where they want to recruit; GeniusHire quickly provides a list of potential applicants include CVs, skills and publications. It can even let hiring professionals know which candidates might already be connected via social networks to people already working within the company.               

“The best way to recruit people,” Song noted, “is via their friends.” With GeniusHire’s information, a company can have its employees reach out to their friends. This “soft approach” is a major feature of the GeniusHire application, enabling the company to sometimes gain information not apparent from resumes while also increasing the chances that a new hire will be a cultural fit with the company.               

GeniusHire started as a project in the Biotechnology Innovation and Computation program, a master’s degree program offered jointly by the Language Technologies Institute and the Lane Center for Computational Biology. This program is designed to educate leaders in applying software and computing technologies to create innovative solutions for the biotechnology, pharmaceutical and health care industries.               

The students initially were focused on mining DNA genomic data to identify certain diseases and protein pathways. But when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration clamped down on a DNA testing firm because of insufficient evidence linking the test results to disease risk, they realized that their business plan was also risky.               

“However, we learned quickly from the Biotech Enterprise Development course about pivoting so we switched from DNA mining to mining social network sites,” Hwang said. “The transition was smooth and we created our first product prototype within a few weeks.”               

The team was one of seven finalists in the 2014 McGinnis Venture Competition, a cross-campus entrepreneurial challenge in which students compete for $60,000 in investments for their startup companies. They also received a $3,000 grant from Amazon for use of cloud computing services.