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 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 COO 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.
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