Investment Notes: Halter’s Series C

Last week, Halter announced its $85M Series C round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners. After first investing in Halter in 2021, we were delighted to continue our journey with Craig and the entire Halter team.

We believe that Halter will be one of the great companies to emerge from New Zealand and has a genuine shot at becoming the default operating system for every farm in the world.

Operating on every farm

Halter runs more productive and sustainable farms using a collar and an app. Without Halter, farms face two major problems: (1) the need to hire and retain staff in a world with significant labour shortages, and (2) a loss of farm productivity due to labour shortage and skill gaps. These two problems drive tight margins for farms, more emissions and a life of long working hours, stress, no sleep and an entire sector struggling with mental health.

It’s rare to find a company where customers are tethered to a product for 3 hours every day while also saving customers 30 hours a week for using it. Halter achieves these metrics by enabling the core operations of a farm to be run by software that is powered by IoT collars.

Farmer-led sales

Halter’s unique distribution insight is that farmers aggregate in strong tight-knit communities because it takes a village to run a farm. Each time Halter delivers its value proposition and saves a farmer ~30 hours a week, organic word of mouth spreads within and around these farming communities. 

The more a farmer uses Halter, the more in love the farmer becomes. This is especially remarkable because Halter’s sales team, the production volume of collars, manufacturing capacity, shipping demands, deployment team and customer support must operate in magical harmony to succeed.

There is no other way we can explain how a small team of sales reps have made exponential growth during a period where COVID-19 forced contracts to be sold largely via phone/zoom.

Poised for more

Halter could remain in New Zealand and be successful with its growing local pipeline alone - but the team has bigger ambitions. 

“If we want to make a global impact, we can’t be only on NZ farms” says Craig, Halter’s founder and CEO. He believes that time is the only constraint from Halter becoming ubiquitous in New Zealand and to us; this ambitious reaction to the company’s recent success is what we search for in our follow-on investments.

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