Thursday, March 28, 2024

Halter raises $32m as farmers wait

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Smart farm company Halter has raised $32 million in a funding round that chief executive Craig Piggott says will primarily be used to drive new hires at the company as it looks to roll-out its product in New Zealand, and then expand overseas.
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The series B round was led by Blackbird Ventures, with investment coming from existing backers, including Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, Icehouse Ventures and US-based venture capital company Data Collective.

Halter’s smart collar tech primarily uses sounds and vibrations to herd cows using a mobile app. The company and its tech has been widely praised, but roll-out to the NZ farming community has been slower than anticipated, with a 2020 commercial launch delayed.

Piggott blamed the lag on the company’s ability to hire the right people.

“The customer pipeline is super strong, but it’s all been pretty much our ability to hire the right people, assemble the right team, get the product working as well as it can, and then drive in through to expanding through NZ, and (then) offshore,” Piggott said.

He says the company, which is ultimately registered in the US, is aiming to hire 115 new roles by the end of the year, mostly for its engineering and product teams.

“The backlog of things we wish we had time to build is hundreds of things long, and so a big part of expanding an engineering team and a product team is our ability to continue to develop those products and those features and release them out to farmers,” he said.

He says the new investment will help the hiring push, despite struggling to find the right hires for the past couple of years.

“It’s a mixture of prepared to work hard and have a good attitude, and also good at what they do and very talented. Everyone loves the idea of working for a start-up, not that many people are cut out for it,” he said.

In a statement, Piggott and Samantha Wong, Blackbird Ventures founder and new Halter board member, claimed that if Halter makes it into half the dairy farms in the Waikato, it will be a billion-dollar company.

Statistics from 2018 suggest there are about 4200 such farms for the taking, but Piggott will not say how many of them currently make use of Halter’s technology.

“We’re rolling out to new farms every week,” he said, and wouldn’t put a number on the total collars currently live on farms.

He says the company will soon publicly reveal its pricing, which for now remains unknown.

Piggott says current commercial customers pay a per cow, per month subscription fee. The collars themselves are given to farmers for free, with Halter retaining ownership of the hardware.

One future customer is Mathew Herbert, a South Taranaki dairy farmer who first saw Halter demo its collar tech at Fieldays agricultural show about three years ago. He says that he hopes to be one of the first farmers to get Halter for his 220-strong herd by the end of the year.

“There’s a lot of people right across the country who have been waiting a number of years because Halter have essentially had themselves out in the marketplace advertising what they do and what they intend to do for a number of years now, but haven’t actually had the product available outside of a very, very limited trial,” Herbert said.

Despite the drawn out wait, Herbert is still very keen.

“It’s definitely taken a bit longer than they probably hinted at early on. But what they are doing is pretty revolutionary. The wait has been long, but I think it’s going to be worth it,” he said.

“There’s a lot of excitement around it. There’s probably also a lot of skepticism that farmers will have to overcome. But we’re not just talking about kind of a small evolution here. We are talking about in some ways, totally redesigning our entire workflow from day-to-day.

“The biggest benefit is actually going to be around labour and the ability to save labour, and streamline the way that you allocate labour. Even if it’s just a one person farm, that one person is still labour.”

He estimated Halter could save him $20,000-$30,000 per year on labour costs alone.

Herbert says he hasn’t been given a quote yet, but he doesn’t think it will take long for his Halter investment to pay for itself.

Halter says that remote herding, which it calls remote shifting, creates “virtual fencing” for farmers.

“From everything I’ve seen, it is passing the test of keeping cows contained in a situation when most cows would really not want to be contained,” Herbert said.

Piggott remains confident that he’s won over farmers such as Herbert, who don’t seem to mind the wait.

“There’s not a direct company that we’re having fierce competition with, which I guess is a good thing,” Piggott said.

“We’ve got phenomenal investors, so capital has never really been a problem and customers are super excited.”

BusinessDesk

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