Startup defies venture capital drought

• Published date: 19 April 2023
• Publication title: Stratford Press

Halter’s collars are wireless, solar-powered and GPS-enabled, and can be controlled via a smartphone app or PC. They are billed as a way for a farm to go fenceless, instead using audio cues to herd cattle, or train them to stay within a defined area

Sensors mean a farmer can remotely monitor a herd’s movement and temperature, and identify which animals have health issues or are on their reproductive cycle.

The firm, founded by ex-Rocket Lab engineer Craig Piggott and originally bankrolled, in part, by his former boss Peter Beck, was already the pacesetter on the local start-up scene, with $39m already in the bag.

The $85m round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the largest American VC firms.

Piggott told the Herald he was first introduced to Bessemer — one of Rocket Lab’s first major offshore backers — through Beck several years ago. It was Halter’s breakthrough performance in 2022 that made the US firm keen to invest.

“Last year alone, we added or trained 100,000 cows. It was that momentum that laid the foundation for the raise.”

New Zealand has a total dairy herd of just under six million, with around four million for beef across just under 50,000 farms, according to Stats NZ figures.

And Piggott also revealed that Halter has recently made its first offshore sales, with a small number of customers in Australia and Ireland. The San Francisco-based Bessemer probably won’t see a lot of Halter’s cow-guiding tech in its home market, given the US propensity for feedlots and dairy barns.

While the capital raising landscape has turned grim overall, Piggott said: “Good companies can still raise money. It was a competitive round.”

Halter was able to pick from a number of suitors. And while Piggott would not give a post-valuation, he said it was more than Halter’s Series B (not a given at a time when there is suddenly a slew of “down-rounds”, or start-ups raising funds at a lower valuation as VCs drive harder bargains for shares).

The Series C round is the latest in a string of successful funding rounds.

Halter’s Series A raise in 2018 brought in $7m from backers including Beck, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 and the Chicago-based Promus Ventures (one of Rocket Lab’s early backers).

A $32m Series B round in 2021 was used to boost staff numbers from 60 to 115, and to start piloting Halter’s product on a clutch of Waikato farms.

The company now has 180 employees and has widened the rollout of its smart collars from the Waikato to...