# Kathryn Cook

> Kathryn Cook is the CEO and co-founder of NuCicer, a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding chickpeas with up to 75% more protein than ordinary varieties. A former Boeing materials engineer and Facebook technical program manager, she left big tech to commercialize 35 years of her father's chickpea genetics research at UC Davis, applying machine learning and data analytics to plant breeding. NuCicer has raised roughly $23 million in total funding, planted across multiple US states, and aims to cut the cost of plant protein in half.

- **Role:** CEO & Co-Founder at NuCicer
- **Organizations:** NuCicer, Boeing, Facebook
- **Nationality:** American
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads NuCicer, raising roughly $23 million in total funding, Developed chickpea varieties with 50-75% more protein (35% protein vs ~20% in commodity chickpeas), Helped expand chickpea genetic diversity roughly 40x by breeding domesticated chickpeas with wild Cicer relatives

## Career timeline

- **Early career** — Materials science engineer at Boeing, developing raw materials and production methods for aerospace applications
- **Mid career** — Technical program manager at Facebook, working on high-altitude aircraft programs, then voice technology (speech recognition and NLP with machine learning teams)
- **2019-2020** — Co-founded NuCicer with her father Doug Cook (UC Davis professor) and Brendan Riely to commercialize high-protein chickpea genetics
- **2022** — NuCicer raised a seed round led by Leaps by Bayer Ventures; also backed by Lever VC
- **2024** — NuCicer placed second in the IFT FIRST 2024 pitch competition
- **2025** — First food products featuring NuCicer chickpeas launched in Q1; Series A funding of $11.5M raised (July 2025), bringing total funding to ~$23M

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads NuCicer, raising roughly $23 million in total funding
- Developed chickpea varieties with 50-75% more protein (35% protein vs ~20% in commodity chickpeas)
- Helped expand chickpea genetic diversity roughly 40x by breeding domesticated chickpeas with wild Cicer relatives
- Aims to cut chickpea protein extraction cost by about 50%
- Placed second in the IFT FIRST 2024 pitch competition
- Scaled production to 1,000+ acres across five US states with plans to expand to 6,000 acres
- Secured a $1M grant from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research

## Latest updates

- **2025-07** — NuCicer raised a $11.5M Series A round, bringing total funding to roughly $23M.
- **2025-01** — First consumer food products featuring NuCicer's high-protein chickpeas launched.

## Links

- Website: https://nucicer.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-cook-309b917

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/kathryn-cook
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-11