Indian startups have been focusing on consumer apps and grocery delivery, but there might be opportunities in sectors that are far removed from the country’s startup hubs.
New Zealand-based cow-tech startup Halter has become a unicorn after a recent fundraise. It is one of the rare startup unicorns in New Zealand, which has a population of just 52 lakh. Halter’s Series D funding was led by tech investment firm Bond and was joined by venture capital firm NewView along with existing backers Bessemer Venture Partners, DCVC, Blackbird, Icehouse Ventures and Promus Ventures.
Halter said it plans to use the new funds to expand in the U.S., where the company has been working with about 150 ranchers in 18 states. “Over half of US ranchers and farmers are over 55, and rural labor shortages are severe,” CEO and founder Craig Piggott said. “Halter enables smaller teams to manage herds more efficiently, without constant physical presence.”
Halter provides farmers with an app and a collar for their cows to help them generate greater yields. The tech enables farmers to virtually fence their cows, move and monitor them, and provide them with real-time insights. Halter installs towers in farmlands so that their devices can work without a cellular connection.
Halter was founded by Craig Piggott, who grew up on a 300-cow dairy farm in New Zealand. He’d studied engineering, and was then working at Rocket Lab, a New Zealand-based company building rockets to send into space. But in 2016, he left his job to focus on the agricultural sector. “If they could build rockets and transform the space industry from New Zealand, why was no one bringing tech to agriculture? With my background in farming, I knew it was an industry ripe for disruption,” he says.
India, for its part, is the largest producer of dairy in the world, but has notoriously low yields on its farms. Also, labour in Indian villages thus far has been plentiful and cheap, which means that human beings often perform much of the job of running farms as opposed to using technology. But as more and more people are migrating from villages to cities, there could end up being labour shortages of Indian farms, and such agri-tech startups could end up being viable in the country.
This world, however, is far removed from the urban Indian startup hubs of Bengaluru and Gurgaon, and startup founders don’t yet seem to be looking to solve problems in Indian agriculture. There are a smattering of agri-tech startups in India, such as Animall, which is a marketplace for farm animals, and Bijak, which a B2B digital marketplace for agriculture businesses such as traders, wholesalers and food processors. But given how most of India’s population is still engaged in agriculture, there should be plenty of opportunities for Indian founders to find problems in the space — and then look to solve them.