An artificial intelligence startup that makes collars for cows is about to be worth more than $2 billion — and some of the biggest names in venture capital are fighting to get in.

Halter, a New Zealand-based company that builds AI-powered smart collars for cattle, is in talks to raise a new funding round led by billionaire Peter Thiel's Founders Fund that would double its valuation to more than $2 billion, Bloomberg reported (1). The deal is reportedly oversubscribed, with so much investor interest that the final size of the round hasn't been determined yet.

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Halter's solar-powered collars use AI to create virtual fences for cattle, eliminating the need for physical barriers. The collars connect to a farmer's phone, allowing ranchers to monitor their herd's location and health indicators through an app — and even move cattle remotely using vibrations and audio cues from the devices.

It's a step beyond the typical livestock monitoring collar, which typically focuses on tracking digestion or breeding cycles. Halter's pitch: full herd management from a smartphone, at $5 to $8 per animal per month.

"The goal was to make pasture farming more sustainable and productive using technology," founder Craig Piggott told Bloomberg in 2024 (1).

The company's last funding round pulled in $100 million at a roughly $1 billion valuation in June, led by BOND. Halter has since set up a Colorado office and said it's prioritizing expansion in the U.S.

Halter's momentum is notable because agtech has had a rough few years. A wave of agricultural technology startups has declared bankruptcy, and venture capital firms have largely pulled back from the sector as companies struggle to convince farmers to adopt their products amid high operational costs.

But precision agriculture — the broader push to use technology to manage farms more efficiently and reduce labour needs — remains a fast-growing market. Industry estimates peg the global precision agriculture market at roughly $9.5 billion in 2025, with projections to surpass $17 billion by 2031 (2). More efficient farming could eventually translate to more stable food prices for consumers, though that connection is still playing out.

Halter is private, so you can't buy shares directly. But several publicly traded companies are already deep in the precision agriculture space — and could benefit as the same tailwinds lift the sector.

Deere & Co. (NYSE: DE) is the closest thing to a precision ag bellwether on public markets. The company has an entire business segment — Production and Precision Agriculture — dedicated to the space. Its See & Spray technology uses cameras and machine learning to identify and target weeds in real time, reducing non-residual herbicide use by nearly 50% across more than 5 million acres in 2025 (3). Deere is also pushing into autonomous tractors and AI-driven field analytics, making it the most direct large-cap play on the sector.

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Merck & Co. (NYSE: MRK) is a name you might not associate with cow collars — but the pharmaceutical giant already makes them. Merck's Allflex and SenseHub divisions reached a milestone of 2 million dairy cows monitored globally in November 2025, and the company sells over 500 million animal identification tags per year (4). Merck paid $2.4 billion to acquire this technology through its purchase of the Antelliq Group in 2019 (5). While it's a small slice of Merck's overall business, it's the most direct public comparison to what Halter is building — though Halter's virtual fencing capability is what sets it apart.

For broader exposure to the theme, AGCO Corp. (NYSE: AGCO) manufactures farm equipment and owns Precision Planting, a division focused on planting and application technology for row crops. CNH Industrial (NYSE: CNH) is similarly investing in digital farming tools across its Case IH and New Holland brands. And Corteva (NYSE: CTVA) focuses on crop protection and precision application technologies, including partnerships with satellite imagery and data analytics platforms.

Agtech may be down broadly, but standout companies are still attracting serious capital. Thiel's bet on Halter signals that investors see precision agriculture as more than a niche — even as the sector sorts out which business models actually work. Between a cow collar startup doubling its valuation in under a year and billions flowing into public players like Deere and Merck, it's a space worth watching.

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Bloomberg (1); ResearchAndMarkets (2); John Deere (3); Merck Animal Health (4); Merck (5)

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