Investment Notes: Halter Series E

We are proud to have invested in Halter's Series E, a US$220 million raise that values the company at US$2 billion and marks another chapter in one of the most compelling founder stories to come out of Aotearoa.

Imagine a job that demands a 4:30 AM start, 80 to 100 hours a week, 365 days a year. No sick days, no weekends off, and no pausing for bad weather. For generations, this gruelling schedule has been the unavoidable reality of pastoral farming.

Craig Piggott grew up living this reality on his family’s dairy farm in the Waikato region of New Zealand. From a young age, he watched his parents and pitched in to work relentlessly just to keep the farm running, intimately understanding the physical and mental toll the industry demands.

Craig left the farm to study mechanical engineering, which led him to a pre-electron engineering and special operations role at Rocket Lab reporting directly to Peter Beck. Inspired by Rocket Lab’s audacity to build transformative technology from New Zealand, Craig realised he could apply that same ambition to the hardest problems in agriculture. He left his job and spent a year relentlessly hacking together 20 different versions of a smart collar, using his parents’ farm as his testing ground to prove his concept. 

And so Halter was born.

At its core, Halter sounds like science fiction: it is a solar-powered smart collar that uses gentle sounds and vibrations to train a cattle to follow cues to move, effectively creating a system to virtually fence and herd livestock. The collar’s sensors and algorithms, fencing and herding system work together to create a complete operating system for a farm. It allows farmers to shift herds, allocate pasture, and monitor individual animal health - all from a smartphone.

The true legacy of Halter isn't just the hardware or the machine learning; it is the profound human impact of the time it gives back. By automating the hardest, most dangerous, and labor-intensive parts of the job, Halter saves farmers 20 to 40 hours a week, while also making it more profitable. It is fundamentally changing what it means to be a farmer.

Blackbird Aotearoa’s origin story

We met Craig the day he signed his US$5M Series A term sheet. It was a sign that being a 2 hour flight away in Sydney was 2 hours too far for the generational founders that Blackbird seeks to back. Within a year we were raising our inaugural New Zealand fund, and 2 years later we were deploying from our office on Ponsonby Road in Auckland.

We were fortunate to lead Halter’s US$20M Series B and have doubled down on every round since, growing our ownership to over 25% and the largest investor shareholder on the cap table. We are forever grateful for Craig’s trust in us. 
At that round, success was far from obvious. The company had 3 customers and very little revenue concentrated in one district in New Zealand. But if you squinted, you could see the DNA of a great company. 

Halter’s very first customer, who moved their entire family to France for a one-year sabbatical just three weeks after installing the system, were confidently running their New Zealand farm remotely from their iPhone. The customer love was overflowing. Farmers evangelised with Halter number plates and uncommon praise. You might say it had become a ‘moovement’.

The numbers today reflect what we saw in the DNA back then. More than 2,000 farmers across New Zealand, Australia and the United States now use Halter, with one million collars in the field. Seven consecutive months of zero customer churn. In New Zealand, one in ten farms already runs on Halter. In Australia and the US, what were early signals at Series D have hardened into consistent record months. What was once a bold idea in the Waikato is now a scaled, multi-continent business.

Craig’s initial spikiness was evident in our first podcast interview with him in 2020 and has only continued to grow. We believe he is one of the truly generational founders, a learn-it-all who moves gracefully between product, customer, team and culture.
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Act II

We wrote in our original investment paper that it will one day be as unthinkable to run a farm without Halter as it is now to run a farm without tractors, quad bikes or electric fences.

The mission of Halter is to make half the planet's habitable landmass more productive and sustainable.

With this raise, the company will be able to take a giant leap forward in achieving that mission. Halter will continue to develop their product for dairy and beef across agentic AI workflows, drones, and hardware. It will continue to rapidly grow in New Zealand, Australia, the US and Canada. Further expansion into Europe and North and South America is on the horizon too.

They are hiring 220 roles across NZ, Australia and the US. Joining Halter means joining one of the highest performing teams in the APAC region, if not the world. 

We couldn't be prouder to support Craig and the Halter team as they bring farming magic to the rest of the world.

Sam and Maddy on behalf of Blackbird