When people imagine where artificial intelligence will make its biggest mark, the image that comes to mind is usually a gleaming tech campus or a bustling city skyline. A paddock in rural New Zealand rarely makes that list. And yet, in the gap between those two worlds, a startup called Halter has quietly built one of the most convincing AI businesses in agriculture today.
In early 2026, the company closed a $220 million funding round that valued it at approximately $2 billion. The round was led by Founders Fund, the venture firm associated with Peter Thiel. That headline alone was enough to raise eyebrows across the startup world. But the real story is the product sitting at the heart of it all: a solar-powered smart collar for cows, guided by machine learning, packaged as a monthly subscription, and steadily reshaping how farms around the world operate.
Continue reading How a Smart Collar Company Built a $2 Billion Operating System for Cattle Farming