Leaps by Bayer has led a $7 million funding round into Davis-based NuCicer Inc., a food technology company that has developed chickpeas with 75% more protein than the standard commercially cultivated legumes.
The second-stage seed round of funding will help the company bring its chickpea products to market in 2023, said co-founder and CEO Kathryn Cook. Leaps by Bayer is the impact investing arm of German chemical and agricultural giant Bayer AG.
“We are truly making a difference in the food system,” Cook said. “Expanding affordable, scalable plant protein beyond currently available soy ingredients is a critical and urgent need for our food system."
The company used cross breeding of wild chickpea genetics with elite commercial strains to develop its strains. The company’s chickpeas are not genetically modified organisms, or GMO.
NuCicer’s other co-founder and chief technology officer is Douglas Cook, a professor at University of California Davis, where he is the director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Climate Resilient Chickpea.
The debt and equity investment led by Bayer this month follows on a $4 million seed round of funding that closed in March this year led by New York-based venture capital firm Lever VC.
The company is a 2019 startup, which currently has 15 employees and will have about 20 at the start of the year, said Douglas Cook, who is Kathryn’s father.
NuCicer is now working with farming networks to grow its cultivar, and then the company will sell them whole or as flour or other products that can be made into alternative meat or dairy products, Kathryn Cook said.
Wild chickpeas contain 40 times the genetic diversity compared to current commercial varieties, and NuCicer employs machine learning and genome breeding to its vast chickpea germplasm library to select desirable wild chickpea traits with standard strains through non-GM cross-breeding.
Commercial chickpeas are water efficient and have the ability to fix nitrogen, which are sustainable traits. NuCicer is also enhancing its strains with climate-friendly traits like acidic soil, heat and drought tolerance, as well as resistance to disease, states a news release by Leaps by Bayer.
“Leaps by Bayer was founded on the principle of driving real change to the world we live in via our investments, and NuCicer is an ideal example of how we’re working collaboratively to make a positive difference,” said Jürgen Eckhardt, head of Leaps by Bayer. “NuCicer is a fascinating business that we believe will assist the development of climate resilient, natural and plant-based protein alternatives that will help decarbonize our food supply chains.”
