The chickpea, reengineered.

A bean company that talks like an engineering firm

It is planting season in Davis, California, and somewhere in a field NuCicer does not own, a Montana grower named Rick Bronec is putting seeds in the ground that did not exist a decade ago. The seeds are chickpeas. That part is ordinary. The part that is not: these chickpeas carry up to 75% more protein than the bean your hummus came from, and they will be off the field 10 to 20 days before their conventional cousins, which means nobody has to spray them with a chemical desiccant to hurry them along.

NuCicer is the company that bred them. Founded in 2019 as a spinout of UC Davis, it now runs a roughly 28-person operation of molecular biologists, plant breeders, bioinformaticians and - this is the tell - people who used to work in aerospace. In July 2025 it closed an $11.5 million Series A, bringing its total raised to $23 million. It sells beans, flour, protein powder and custom genetics to food brands. It would like to sell a lot more.

That sentence is the whole company in one line. Most food founders talk about flavor and mission. Cook talks about materials science, because that is the field she came from. NuCicer treats the chickpea less like a vegetable and more like a substrate to be redesigned - a humble legume with an unusually large design space.

Plant protein got popular and processed to death

Here is the inconvenient truth of the plant-based aisle: most of its protein comes from soy and yellow pea, and getting that protein out requires a lot of industrial chemistry. Isolates are stripped, washed and refined until what is left is high in protein and, frequently, low in anything resembling pleasure. The category sold a great story about health and the planet. It under-delivered on dinner.

So food brands were stuck with a familiar trade-off. Fortify a product with pea protein and you raise the number on the nutrition panel - and often dent the flavor. Add fiber separately. Add starch to fix the texture you just broke. Each fix is another ingredient, another line, another processing step. The chickpea, NuCicer noticed, was sitting right there: naturally pleasant, naturally fibrous, broadly beloved. It just did not carry enough protein to compete. Yet.

A father's 15-year hobby, a daughter's company

The science predates the startup by about a decade and a half. Douglas Cook, a UC Davis professor of plant pathology, spent more than 15 years collecting hundreds of wild chickpea samples from the crop's ancestral range and building a crossbreeding program around them. He is, by reputation, the world's foremost chickpea expert. He also happens to be the father of Kathryn Cook, who had been off building things in aerospace and AI.

The bet was that this pile of ancestral genetics - the largest pool of chickpea diversity on earth - was not an academic curiosity but a commercial platform. Modern agriculture had bred chickpeas for a narrow set of traits and left enormous variation on the table. Reintroduce it with predictive, data-driven breeding, and you could dial protein up, fat down, fiber up, and harvest time forward, all without a single transgene.

Kathryn Cook took the CEO seat, Douglas Cook the chief scientific officer's, and co-founder Brendan Riley rounded out the founding trio. A $1 million grant from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research got the wheels turning. The family-business angle is charming. The genetics are the actual moat.

One bean, a whole ingredient catalog

NuCicer does not sell a single SKU; it sells a platform dressed up as four products. There are Better Beans - whole chickpeas bred for taste and nutrition. There are Functional Flours for gluten-free pasta and baked goods. There is Protein Powder, minimally processed, for brands that want fortification without the chemistry set. And there are Bespoke Trait Packages: if a food company needs a chickpea with a particular protein-to-fiber ratio or flavor profile, NuCicer breeds toward it.

Four products, one legume, zero transgenes. The chickpea has had a busy decade for something that mostly just sits in a can.

Underneath all of it runs the predictive breeding platform - genomics plus machine learning, sitting on that ancestral gene pool. The pitch to a food brand is a tidy piece of arithmetic NuCicer calls 2-for-1: hit your protein and fiber targets in a single ingredient instead of bolting on three. Fewer lines on the label tend to make both regulators and shoppers happier.

Where the protein actually lands

A 14-point jump on a bean sounds small until you remember the entire alt-protein industry was built fighting over single digits.

Acres, awards, and a Bayer-shaped vote of confidence

Talk is cheap; acreage is not. NuCicer planted more than 2,500 acres of its high-protein variety in 2025 and intends to multiply that roughly tenfold in 2026. That is the part investors tend to like, because it is hard to fake a field. The crop's early maturity - 10 to 20 days ahead of conventional chickpeas - cuts late-season weather risk and removes the need for chemical desiccants, which is good for the grower's margin and the marketing department alike.

The capital table reads like a who's-who of people paid to be skeptical. The 2025 Series A was led by Rhapsody Venture Partners, with Leaps by Bayer returning and Illumina Ventures, Better Ventures, Stray Dog Capital and an unnamed leading global food company joining. The earlier seed had Lever VC and Leaps by Bayer. Along the way, NuCicer placed second at the Institute of Food Technologists' 2024 IFT FIRST pitch competition. Work with major pasta and snack brands is underway, even if the brand names stay coy for now.

The founding trio: an aerospace-and-AI CEO, the world's leading chickpea scientist, and a third co-founder. Family dinners, one assumes, get technical.

Make the best bean on earth, then make more of it

NuCicer's stated goal is to "unlock the potential of the best bean on earth" - to lift the chickpea into the front rank of global protein crops while keeping the processing minimal and the soil healthy. Chickpeas fix nitrogen and work well in crop rotations, so a grower who plants them is, almost incidentally, doing something kind for the dirt. The company frames this not as charity but as alignment: better nutrition for eaters, better margins for farmers, better ingredients for brands, all riding on the same seed.

It is a tidy thesis, and tidy theses make investors nervous for good reason. The challenge, as one Bayer-side advisor put it, will be getting a foot in the door of an ingredient supply chain that runs on long contracts and entrenched relationships. Breeding a superior bean is the science problem. Convincing a multinational to reformulate around it is the harder, slower, human one.

The quiet glow-up of a 10,000-year-old crop

Global protein demand keeps climbing and the planet keeps not getting bigger. The default answers - more soy, more processing, more land - are running low on headroom. NuCicer's wager is that a chunk of the answer was domesticated thousands of years ago and simply under-explored: take the genetic diversity that conventional breeding discarded, point modern genomics at it, and you get more nutrition per acre without asking eaters to choke down something worse.

Back in that field, the math is no longer hypothetical. The Montana grower's seeds will come up as plants carrying a third more protein than the commodity standard, mature early enough to dodge the worst of the weather, and head off to become pasta or powder or flour without a chemical bath. Five years ago those seeds did not exist. The chickpea you have eaten your whole life is, it turns out, a draft. NuCicer is editing it.