Founders Fund has made its name supporting what Peter Thiel calls “zero-to-one” companies — businesses that don’t just improve on existing ideas but create something completely new. Its portfolio includes Facebook, SpaceX and Palantir. Her latest bet is a New Zealander putting smart solar-powered collars on cows.
Halterwhich closed a $220 million Series E at a $2 billion valuation last month, with Founders Fund leading the round, isn’t the kind of company that tends to dominate tech headlines. No artificial intelligence agency involved, no humanoid robots. There is, however, one very big and largely unsolved problem: How do you manage cattle spread across some of the most remote terrain on earth, without dogs, horses, motorbikes or helicopters?
Craig Piggott, the 30-year-old founder and CEO of Halter, spent nine years working on an answer. “If you’re running a pasture-based farm, whether it’s dairy or beef, the most important variable is how you manage the productivity of your land,” Piggott told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “Fences are the lever – they control where the animals graze and how you rest the land. Being able to do that actually made a lot of sense.”
The system Halter built combines a solar-powered collar, a network of low-frequency towers, and a smartphone app to allow farmers to create virtual fences, monitor each animal around the clock, and move their herds without ever leaving the farmhouse. Cattle are trained to respond to sound cues and vibrations from the collar — a process Piggott likens to the way a car makes a sound as it approaches a wall while parked. Most animals, he says, learn within three interactions with a virtual fence. “Then you can guide them and move them with just sound and vibration.”
The collar does more than the herd. Because it’s always on and collecting behavioral data, it also monitors animal health, tracks fertility cycles and pinpoints when individual animals might be sick, capabilities that Piggott says have improved dramatically as Halter has amassed the world’s largest set of cattle behavioral data. The company is now on its fifth generation of hardware, and its player is currently in beta with customers in the US.
“The product farmers are using today is radically different to what they bought a year ago,” Piggott said. “Every week, we release new things to our customers.”
Piggott grew up on a dairy farm in New Zealand before studying engineering and landing a brief stint at Rocket Lab, the rocket company that gave him his first glimpse of what a tech startup could be. “Rocket Lab was kind of my introduction to technology and startups and the venture capital world,” he said. “The realization that you could raise money, hire a team and pursue an ambitious mission was empowering. I wanted to do that in agriculture.” He started Halter at 21. “Probably a little naive in retrospect,” he acknowledged, “but it was okay.”
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Nine years later, Halter’s collar is on more than a million cattle on more than 2,000 farms in New Zealand, Australia and the United States, where the company operates in 22 states. The economic proposition for farmers is simple: by giving ranchers precise control over where their herds graze, Halter can increase the productivity of their land by up to 20% — not by saving on labor costs (although that happens, too), but by ensuring cattle graze more efficiently and leave less grass. “In some cases, we’re seeing customers literally double the production from their land,” Piggott said. “The cap on returns is very, very strong.”
Halter is not alone in spying the opportunity. Pharmaceutical giant Merck is already building its own virtual fencing system for cattle, called Vence, and newer entrants are also on the way—at Y Combinator’s most recent “demo day,” a startup called Grazemate presented a vision for cattle grazing with autonomous drones (no collars needed).
Pigott seems unfazed by either. Asked about drones, he says: “Can I see drones playing some small role in the future? Possibly. But I don’t think a drone is the right form factor for the basic fencing element of virtual fencing. A collar will probably be the right form factor for a very long time.” And in terms of the bigger competitive picture, he argues that the real obstacle isn’t competing technology at all. “The biggest competition is just not changing anything,” he said. “He’s doing what you did last year.”
What sets Halter apart, Piggott argues, is the sheer mechanical difficulty of what he’s spent nine years solving—a system that manages a thousand animals must be reliable over many nine runs, because even a 1% failure rate means ten animals out at any given time. “Chasing those many credibility nines takes time,” he said, “and that long tail is what we proved in New Zealand for many years before we started expanding globally.”
Halter is also something of an outlier in the ag-tech sector, which has retreated in recent years as startups try to convince farmers to adopt new products while managing high operating costs. Piggott attributes Halter’s appeal to its relentless focus on financial performance. “Since day one, Halter has been built around a really strong financial return on investment,” he said. “If you can increase the productivity of the land by 20%, that flows through the whole business.”
Unlike most tech companies, Halter doesn’t see the United States as the center of its universe. “The US market is important to us, but it’s not the biggest market in the world,” Piggott said. “Agriculture is spread all over the world and we have to get there too.” The company has now raised about $400 million in total and is prioritizing expansion in the US, South America and Europe.
But the scale of the remaining opportunity is perhaps best captured in a single number – one that no doubt resonated with both Founders Fund and Halter’s previous backers. The halter collar is on a million cattle, while there are a billion more in the world. With less than 10% penetration in its home market of New Zealand alone, “We have a long way to go and a lot of product to build,” Piggott said.
You can hear our conversation with Piggott in this newest episode of the series Download StrictlyVC podcast, which comes out Tuesday.
