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Geek Wire
15-07-2025
- Business
- Geek Wire
Seattle startup Zucca raises $5M to help food brands launch products faster with AI
GeekWire's startup coverage documents the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene. Sign up for our weekly startup newsletter , and check out the GeekWire funding tracker and venture capital directory . Zucca team members, from left: Carly Rector, acting CTO; Karen Huh, CEO and co-founder; Theo Han, engineer; Nana Gilbert-Baffoe, CTO; Matt Jinkens, engineer; and Jesse Guzman, COO and co-founder. (Zucca Photo) Karen Huh spent two decades and thousands of hours launching consumer products for companies like Starbucks and Bulletproof Coffee. So when she saw a prototype that Pioneer Square Labs was cooking up — using AI to bring new products to market faster and more efficiently — she recognized the value immediately. 'It was a light bulb that went off,' she said. Huh is the CEO and co-founder of Zucca, a new Seattle-based startup and PSL spinout emerging from stealth with a $5 million seed round. Zucca's software uses generative AI to help food and beverage companies reimagine product development — making it a parallel process rather than a sequential one. Instead of waiting for concepts, R&D, sourcing, and business planning to happen one after the other, Zucca lets users manage all those steps simultaneously in a centralized workspace. The platform integrates internal and external data, automates key functions, and systematically manages details or requirements as changes happen in real-time. The end result is a tool that turns product development into a 'symphony orchestra,' rather than a baton-passing relay race, as Huh put it. Zucca's main competition isn't other startups, but classic productivity tools like Google Docs and Excel, Huh said. 'We're enabling folks to get smarter, catch things before they fall through the cracks, and be able to do so much more than they would have been able to do before,' she said. Huh also billed Zucca as way to 'de-risk' product development — enabling teams to take more swings at different ideas. 'Zucca provides the ability to take a deeper run at a number of concepts in parallel, so that you don't have to put all your eggs in one basket,' Huh said. Zucca generates new product concepts within minutes based on product guardrails. (Zucca Image) Zucca is built on models from OpenAI and Anthropic to help create a unique architecture that 'understands the workflow for food and beverage product development,' said CTO and co-founder Jesse Guzman. Interest in AI-powered product innovation is rising. The Wall Street Journal recently spotlighted how CPG giant Clorox is using AI to accelerate development of Hidden Vally Ranch flavors and other products. Zucca is initially targeting mid-market CPG brands and R&D firms. The company has about a dozen beta users and is transitioning to paid customers. Huh was previously CEO at Joywell Foods; Guzman was most recently a principal at PSL and also spent time at Rain, NerdWallet, and Prophet. Zucca was previously featured in GeekWire's Startup Radar spotlight. It has five employees. Acre Venture Partners led the seed round, which included PSL Ventures, AIStudio Fund (funded by Mayfield), Sugar Mountain Capital (holding company behind Beecher's Handmade Cheese), and other angel investors. 'As we were getting to know the team, we put them in front of a range of customers, and the response from people we've known for many years was so clear that we quickly wanted to ensure the company is well-funded,' Lucas Mann, managing partner at Acre in Southern California, told GeekWire.
Geek Wire
25-06-2025
- Business
- Geek Wire
‘Massive productivity booster': Seattle developers on how Cursor is changing the way they code
GeekWire's startup coverage documents the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene. Sign up for our weekly startup newsletter , and check out the GeekWire funding tracker and venture capital directory . Kevin Leneway, principal AI software engineer at Pioneer Square Labs, writes code with Cursor during a meetup in Seattle on Tuesday. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper) Seattle software engineers say Cursor, an AI-powered code editor, is revolutionizing how they work — boosting productivity, enabling faster prototyping, and opening the door to more ambitious projects. Pioneer Square Labs hosted the first-ever Cursor Seattle meetup on Tuesday, reflecting the rising popularity of fast-growing AI coding tools being adopted by programmers. Cursor integrates large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to suggest, write, and refactor code, aiming to make development faster and smarter. 'It's a massive productivity boost,' said Gabe Brown, co-founder of Big Box, a Seattle video game startup acquired by Meta in 2021. Brown recently 'vibe-coded' an app in 90 minutes — something he said would have taken four weeks without the help of Cursor. Matt Deitke, co-founder of Seattle startup Vercept, told GeekWire it's 'fundamentally changing how much code you can write.' The buzz isn't limited to startups. Amazon is reportedly in talks to deploy Cursor internally — even as it builds its own AI coding assistant — in a sign of growing interest from tech giants. Investors are also taking notice. Anysphere, the small San Francisco startup behind Cursor, recently hit a $9.9 billion valuation after raising $900 million — its third fundraise in less than a year. The startup was founded in 2022. Windsurf, a rival to Cursor, agreed last month to be acquired by OpenAI for about $3 billion. Cursor also competes with GitHub Copilot, Replit, and others. Kevin Leneway and Jared Kofron, engineers at Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs, kicked off the event on Tuesday by using Cursor to build an icebreaker game in under 30 minutes. The end result wasn't quite perfect but did generate a working demo. Nick Miller, an engineer with Cursor, later joined via video to share insights and tips. Miller said 95% of his code is now written by a machine. The software engineer's job description is starting to change, Miller said. 'I'm really more supervising and orchestrating, as opposed to writing code by hand,' he said. 'I think we're going in that direction.' Leneway, who posts Cursor tutorial videos on YouTube, echoed that sentiment. 'My daily job has changed from writing code to acting more as a project manager to define what I want built, then reviewing code the Cursor agent wrote,' he told GeekWire. 'I personally have a lot more job satisfaction now since I can work at a bit of a more strategic level focused on architecture and product rather than typing out code and manually tracking down bugs.' Like many nascent AI tools, Cursor offers powerful advantages but also has limitations. Some users complain that Cursor adds bugs or makes their code worse. And hallucination is still a concern. Cursor itself inadvertently made headlines last month after its AI support bot generated a company policy that didn't actually exist. Miller advised engineers to focus on using Cursor's 'Rules' feature and attaching documentation to help guide the coding agents. He also stressed creating new 'context windows' for individual projects or tasks. 'The key is sort of 'context window engineering' — thinking about when to start new session, thinking about how to start those sessions, and really being aware of what is in that context window,' Miller said. AI coding tools are also sparking questions about whether AI will replace software engineering jobs. But inside the meetup on Tuesday in Seattle, the feeling was more of excitement than fear. Harshitha Rebala, who recently graduated from the University of Washington and just joined Vercept, said she's using Cursor to get questions answered. 'It's really helpful to get ramped up on the codebase,' she said. Ron Theis, a longtime software engineer in Seattle, said he's now doing much more code review and a 'higher level of problem solving.' 'The number of curly braces I've typed since I started using Cursor has gone way down,' Theis said, alluding to the common punctuation used in programming.
