Halter was named last year as the fastest growing company by Deloitte Fast 50 and its private valuation of $1.65 billion follows a successful investment raise of $165 million led by United States venture capital firm Bond.
The company, which has invested about $300m into innovations and now has a team of 350 staff, was launched in 2016.
Now its fenceless technology can be found on more than 1000 farms in New Zealand, Australia and, since a year ago, the US.
Founder and chief executive Craig Piggott said they were focused on the three nations at this stage and providing strong local support, before branching out into Europe or other markets.
"We are excited about South America. Obviously there are some considerations to doing business in South America, but it’s a question of when not if. I don’t have a date, but we are excited about it."
While its large beef cattle herds made it an attractive prospect, Halter was in a fast growth phase and trying to hire 100 new staff over the next few months for existing markets was already tricky, he said.
"Every market we launch into we expect and plan to have fast and strong uptake. The down side of that is we are just not in lots of markets. We are not in Ireland or the UK which are great markets and we will do them one day, but we want to be quite focused and do a good job on them."
Scaling and growing the business was hard, but more cows and farmers joining the system helped it reinvest in better products, adding more data to continue innovating, he said.
After speaking at the Precision Dairy Farming conference in Christchurch, farmers from Japan and the UK came up to him asking when they could get the collar system.
He told the audience Halter was on track to surpass 1 million cows early next year.
"About 250,000 at the moment are in the South Island. So the South Island is definitely one of our key, if not our key market, for Halter at the moment ... We are now on about one in four, pushing one in three, cows in some post codes."
Halter has a firm hold in Australia’s Tasmania with about 30% to 40% of all cows wearing collars.
New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia are next in line with virtual fencing now legal after a change in "outdated" regulations linked previously to a ban on restricting electricity on dog collars.
Mr Piggott said they were hiring teams in Australia and demand was growing as farmers were seeing the Tasmanian results.
Halter is at about the 650,000 cow mark with numbers more than doubling each year.
Mr Piggott said US sales had been going extremely well and some key states also denied them should open soon.
While it was a different market, ranchers were still trying to grow more grass and allocate feed more accurately and this was a huge opportunity, he said.
He said the relatively smaller dairy pastoral market remained important.
"The trend we see in these other markets is they all want to become NZ dairy farmers. Already we are seeing ranchers in the US that are shifting their cows five times a day."
Mr Piggott said the company had recently closed a funding round of $165m and was recruiting 75 to 80 roles.
"We would happily hire 100 people if we could find them at the moment. That’s across scientists, engineers, designers, but also support and sales people. We are still really, really early and do feel like we are just getting started."
Mr Piggott said their investors had helped them commercialise Halter.
Investor groups were selected which had scaled businesses globally and had experience in running at-scale businesses.
Growing the business based on self-generated revenue had been an option for Halter for a few years.
Mr Piggott said the capital raise was not needed, but was right for the business to be more ambitious and grow faster.
He said they did not get out of bed trying to focus on lifting a big valuation, but it allowed them to raise more capital, go faster and invest in more products and achieve more as a business.
"We try and build the best product and you hope if you build the best product your farmers are successful and then your company will be valued highly and that enables you to raise more capital and be more ambitious."
More money will likely be raised in the future.
Halter is a private company and he has not released his shareholding publicly.
