NoFence plots US, European expansion for virtual fencing following oversubscribed $35m Series B raise
Virtual fencing company Nofence (NoFence) has raised over $35 million in an oversubscribed Series B round it says is Europe’s largest agtech funding round so far in 2025.
The company, founded in Norway in 2011, says it will use the new funds to expand its reach across markets in Europe and the US, with especial focus on the latter.
The company makes solar-powered, GPS-enabled collars for herd animals so that farmers can monitor their movements from a smartphone.
If an animal crosses the boundary set within the app, the collar plays an audio warning that’s a scale of tones rising in pitch the further the animal moves through the boundary zones. The collar issues “a mild but effective electric pulse” if it plays the entire scale and the animal has still not turned around.
Over time, animals learn to recognize the audio warning and turn around to avoid the electric pulse.
According to CEO Joachim Kähler , NoFence is currently the only virtual fencing company to cater to goat and sheep farming.
It is also focused specifically on small and medium-sized farms, which “are the ones that oftentimes struggle the most to make ends meet,” he tells AgFunderNews. “They don’t have a lot of capital for upfront capital expenditure.”
Fencing costs can range anywhere between thousands and tens of thousands, not including the upkeep required in subsequent years.
Given that, NoFence also uses existing cellular networks to enable the collars to communicate with the mobile app. This, says Kähler, can be more cost-effective than installing transmission stations on ranch lands, as other virtual fencing companies have done.
While transmission towers might work for large operations, “the whole installation process and the sales process are just too complex if you have 20 goats and you’re curious to start doing rotational gracing,” he says.
Meanwhile, though reliable connectivity can still be an issue on cellular networks on some rural areas, Kähler says NoFence is working on different strategies to mitigate that.
For example, it recently launched a functionality where only one collar needs a connection, which it can then send out to all other collars in the herd, much like a mesh network.
Enabling rotational grazing
So far, NoFence has deployed more than 150,000 collars around Norway, the US, Spain, and the UK.
The hope is to enable more farmers and ranchers to adopt rotational grazing practices through the virtual fencing solution.
“There’s a growing scientific consensus that if we implement effective rotational grazing, a cow becomes a net positive contributor to the environment,” explains Kähler.
Rotational grazing comes with a number of ecological benefits, including better soil, more water retention, decreased erosion, and faster-growing grasses, to name a few. These things in turn can lower input costs and make it possible for farmers to stack on additional sources of income, such as carbon credits.
However, “one of your key restrictions for implementing rotational grazing is that you either need more fencing infrastructure or you need to use more of your own or hired labor to move the fences cap around,” says Kähler.
NoFence, he adds, makes it easier to start rotational grazing without any kind of additional fencing costs or labor costs.
Virtual fencing will be ‘fundamentally ground-changing’
The European Circular Bioeconomy Fund led the oversubscribed Series B round with participation from Capagro, Nysnø Climate Investments, Climate Innovation Capital, and Speedinvest.
Funding will go towards bringing better products to market faster in the US and Europe, says Kähler.
NoFence will also continue to develop and improve its products both on the hardware and software side.
“We think virtual fencing is in its infancy as a product category, both for what you can expect from the hardware, and for what you’re interacting with and the recommendations you’re getting from the software,” he notes.
“It’s easy to underestimate how fundamentally ground-changing virtual fencing can be, and how how large it’s probably going to be. We spend a lot of time talking about where we are as a company today and where we want to go in an effective way and bring investors along on the journey."
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