Halter's smart collar system manages livestock across remote terrain using virtual fences, audio cues and real-time health monitoring
Halter, a New Zealand agricultural technology startup that fits solar-powered smart collars on cattle, has closed a $220 million Series E funding round at a $2 billion valuation, with Peter Thiel's Founders Fund leading the investment.
The raise is an unlikely bet for Founders Fund, whose portfolio has included Facebook, SpaceX and Palantir, but the firm says Halter addresses a genuinely unsolved problem: how to manage livestock across vast, remote terrain without dogs, horses, motorbikes or helicopters.
Halter's system combines a solar-powered collar, a network of low-frequency signal towers and a smartphone app, allowing farmers to create virtual fences, monitor every animal around the clock and move herds without leaving the farmhouse.
Cattle are trained to respond to audio and vibration cues from the collar, with most animals learning to respect a virtual boundary within three interactions, according to founder and chief executive Craig Piggott.
The collar also tracks animal health, monitors fertility cycles and flags potential illness, drawing on what Piggott describes as likely the world's largest dataset of cattle behaviour, built over nine years of operation.
Halter's collar is currently fitted to more than one million cattle across more than 2,000 farms in New Zealand, Australia and 22 US states, with the company having raised roughly $400 million in total.
Piggott says the system can lift land productivity by as much as 20%, with some farmers doubling output from the same acreage.
The company is now prioritising expansion across the US, South America and Europe, though Piggott notes the scale of the remaining opportunity in a single figure: one million collars deployed, one billion cattle still to reach.
