Halter raises $100M Series D at $1.65B valuation to scale virtual fencing collars for cattle across three countries

Cheers. Bye. Uh, next up we have Craig Pigot from Halter. I was very excited for this company. They raised money. This is the most excited you've ever been about a startup. Well, it's an extremely bullish story and we'll hear it from him. It's about running your ranch the way you've always wanted. Yes.

Thank you so much for joining, Craig. How are you doing? I'm doing good. How you guys doing? Uh, you're overseas, correct? I'm in uh New Zealand. Yes. Awesome. Uh, thank you. I think it's early your time, I guess. Is that right? Oh, it's like 8:30. It's not too bad. Okay, not too bad.

Uh, well, thank you so much for joining. Uh, why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company? Cool. Yeah. Craig, um, founder and CEO of a company called Halter. Originally from a farm, engineer by training.

I did a stint at Rocket Lab, working for Peter Beck, which was kind of my intro to startups. Um and then yeah founded halter. We effectively are an operating system for a or for farmers and ranchers. Uh we built a collar that goes on a cow.

Um that collar is solar powered and um runs a bunch of ML on the edge to train the animal to respond to cues. So we can then virtually fence and shift these animals from a phone or from the farm's phone. Uh which means we can run more productive farms. Um egg covers about half the planet's a lamass.

So that's like the the goal I guess is to lift the productivity of that of that land. Interesting. So yeah. Uh what was the state of the art beforehand? Um fences. Just cowboys. Yeah. Barbw is literally barbwire.

Fences for hundreds of years have lifted the productivity of land, but obviously they're pretty expensive and hard to move and a lot of shortcomings. And so how do you actually steer animals with just a collar? They the collar has cues on it, like sound cues out of each side.

Um, if you imagine maybe like parking your car and as you like back into a wall, it beeps and so it gives you like feedback on how close you are to a virtual fence. Um, so we use sound and vibration and then we train the animals with a low energy pulse.

It's like 100 times less than an electric fence that say most cows in New Zealand would be used to. Yeah. Um and yeah, the collar does all of that training and and kind of animal guidance. What has been the story around uh cowboy employment in the context of uh adoption of tech?

I imagine this is the kind of thing where uh I'm using cowboy uh sort of as a joke but but I imagine by introducing this technology you can free up you know ranch workers to do more important things like for example taking care of a sick cow or something like that. Has that been the case?

Yeah like um there's been massive labor shortages on farms and ranches for a long long time. It's obviously not glamorous work. And so I think a tool like halter does automate a bunch of work.

Um but really it also enables you to just be more precise and kind of run a like a a more productive operation and then you can any extra time you do have you spend on the neverending kind of to-do list of running a a ranch or a farm. Yeah. Can you give us the state of the business?

I mean yeah I want to know about scale. I imagine how many how many cows are we tracking at this point? I I I think people don't understand the scale of your business, so I just want to hear from you. Yeah, we're live in New Zealand, which is where we started. Um, Australia and the US.

I think we're across like 18ish states in the US. Um, we're on over a thousand farms, um, hundreds of thousands of cows, uh, which we fence and shift and track and monitor their health every day. Mhm. Um and growing uh over like 2x year on year at the moment. So it is like and there's Well, you got a lot of room to run.

I looked it up. There's one and a half billion cows in the world. Uh according to some survey. Um and I'm sure some percentage of that are just relatively wild and and not billion cows. Wait, cows are expensive. I feel like that's like a trillion dollar market then. It must be. Yeah. I had no idea.

the um the the funny thing about the TAM is it's like it's very different to most businesses. It's kind of a function of land mass, not like population. So you do end up with um like a very distributed TAM through South America and Europe, like everywhere. Um so but the market is is huge.

So we're trying to remain focused on yeah NZ, Australia and the US like even within that is just a multi-billion dollar opportunity for us. science. Would you guys would you guys ever do uh health tracking for the animals? Is that something that you already do?

I imagine farmers would would love to understand like metrics around stuff like heart rate, HRV, things like that, steps, etc. Yeah. To do the guidance well, you need to understand each cow's like behavior um and how they respond to the cues and how best to train them.

So kind of a a byproducts maybe underelling it, but as a function of that you then can also do health and fertility and things like that very well as well.

So um we already that's already part of the product um whether a cow's sick or um not healthy for any reason or if they're fertile um which is important for breeding and things like that. too. Yep. If you got the hardware there, you know, that is just a over there update to a to the collar.

Um, and then we kind of turn that on as like a additional SAS product. So, I mean, is the is the is the business model mostly uh like subscription SAS uh structured or is there a hardware component and a fixed cost as well to kind of onboard? It is um the hardware is bundled in the software.

So it's pure purely a per it is like very sass like there is tiers you can start on core and upgrade to pro or unlimited and um there's a small kind of upfront installation fee um we have to put up towers on these farms to like run the network to talk to the collars so um but predominantly it's just a ongoing subscription you don't buy the collars or anything like that.

Yeah take us through the raise and kind of what the plan is going forward. Yeah. So, we just closed a 100 mil series D from uh led by Bond. Um very meer. There we go. Love it. Awesome. Awesome firm.

Um and probably two things really like um more expansion in terms of new markets and and even just pushing harder into the markets that we're currently in.

and then a huge amount of product and R&D work like we've kind of for the first time taken a very analog operation and converted it into this like digital farm like farmers spend 2 hours a day in the product and they're doing everything from animal health to the fencing and shifting to like measuring their grass and all that.

So, and there's just so much kind of room to run on new product and and shipping new product. So that's the other kind of half of the of the raise is just doing more kind of building our product and engineering teams and doing more R&D on that side. Will we see will we see cow BCIs in the next uh 20 years?

BCIS um good good question. Don't know. Don't know. Yeah, maybe maybe unnecessary. Uh it's uh but you know if if you can do something you know a call a collar is potentially more uh elegant solution uh than than probably pretty costly to uh to implant the brain chip but who knows anything's possible.

If anybody's going to do it you guys. Yeah. Uh well thanks for stopping by. There's definitely some benefits to being on the on the outside. Yeah, for sure. It's a little bit easier to change it out and clean it off if you need to. Awesome. Well, congrats on the raise and uh yeah, come back on when you have more news.

Yeah, thanks so much for stopping on. Cheers. Uh up next we have uh Jonathan from Grock coming into the studio talking about chips. Hopefully we can uh get him in. We've been juggling things. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? Go to eightleep. com. Absolutely terribly. My eight couldn't couldn't save me. My