Founders Fund has made its title backing what Peter Thiel calls “zero to at least one” firms — companies that don’t simply enhance on present concepts however create one thing fully new. Its portfolio contains Fb, SpaceX, and Palantir. Its newest guess is a New Zealand startup that places solar-powered sensible collars on cows.
Halter, which closed a $220 million Collection E at a $2 billion valuation final month, with Founders Fund main the spherical, isn’t the sort of firm that tends to dominate expertise headlines. There isn’t any agentic AI concerned, no humanoid robots. There may be, nonetheless, a really giant and largely unsolved downside: How do you handle cattle unfold throughout a few of the most distant terrain on earth, with out canine, horses, motorbikes, or helicopters?
Craig Piggott, Halter’s 30-year-old founder and CEO, has spent 9 years engaged on a solution. “In case you handle a pasture-based farm, whether or not it’s dairy or beef, a very powerful variable is the way you handle the productiveness of your land,” Piggott informed TechCrunch in a latest interview. “Fences are the lever — they management the place animals graze and the way you relaxation the land. Having the ability to try this nearly simply made loads of sense.”
The system Halter has constructed combines a solar-powered collar, a community of low-frequency towers, and a smartphone app to let farmers create digital fences, monitor each animal across the clock, and transfer their herds with out ever leaving the farmhouse. Cattle are skilled to answer audio and vibration cues from the collar — a course of Piggott that likens to the way in which a automobile beeps because it approaches a wall whereas parking. Most animals, he says, be taught inside three interactions with a digital fence. “Then you definitely’re in a position to information them and shift them round on sound and vibration alone.”
The collar does greater than herd. As a result of it’s all the time on and accumulating behavioral information, it additionally tracks animal well being, screens fertility cycles, and flags when particular person animals could also be sick, capabilities that Piggott says have improved dramatically as Halter has accrued what is probably going the world’s largest dataset of cattle conduct. The corporate is now on its fifth technology of {hardware}, and its copy product is at the moment in beta with U.S. clients.
“The product that ranchers use in the present day is radically completely different to what they purchased a yr in the past,” Piggott mentioned. “Each week, we’re releasing new issues to our clients.”
Piggott grew up on a dairy farm in New Zealand earlier than finding out engineering and touchdown a short stint at Rocket Lab, the rocket firm that gave him his first glimpse of what a expertise startup could possibly be. “Rocket Lab was sort of my introduction to expertise and startups and the world of enterprise capital,” he mentioned. “Realizing you possibly can increase cash, rent a workforce, and chase an bold mission was inspiring. I wished to try this in agriculture.” He began Halter at 21. “Most likely a bit naive in hindsight,” he acknowledged, “however that was nice.”
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
9 years later, Halter’s collar is on greater than one million cattle throughout greater than 2,000 farms in New Zealand, Australia, and the USA, the place the corporate operates in 22 states. The monetary proposition for farmers is easy: By giving ranchers exact management over the place their herds graze, Halter can raise the productiveness of their land by as a lot as 20% — not by saving labor prices (although that occurs, too), however by making certain cattle graze extra effectively and depart much less grass behind. “In some instances, we see clients actually doubling the output off their land,” Piggott mentioned. “The higher ceiling for returns could be very, very sturdy.”
Halter isn’t alone in spying the chance. Pharmaceutical large Merck already makes its personal digital fencing system for cattle, known as Vence, and newer entrants are circling too — at Y Combinator’s most up-to-date “demo day,” a startup known as Grazemate offered a imaginative and prescient for herding cattle with autonomous drones (no collars needed).
Piggott appears unbothered by both. Requested about drones, he solutions: “Can I see drones enjoying some small half sooner or later? Most likely. However I don’t suppose a drone is the best type issue for the core fencing factor of digital fencing. A collar will most likely be the best type issue for a really lengthy time frame.” And as for the larger aggressive image, he argues the true impediment isn’t rival expertise in any respect. “The most important competitors is simply not altering something,” he mentioned. “It’s doing what you probably did final yr.”
What units Halter aside, Piggott argues, is the sheer engineering issue of what it has spent 9 years fixing — a system managing a thousand animals must be dependable to many nines of uptime, as a result of even a 1% failure fee means ten animals out at any given time. “Chasing these many nines of reliability takes time,” he mentioned, “and that lengthy tail is what we proved out in New Zealand over a few years earlier than we began to increase globally.”
Halter can also be one thing of an outlier within the agricultural expertise sector, which has slumped in recent times as startups struggled to influence farmers to undertake new merchandise whereas managing excessive operational prices. Piggott attributes Halter’s traction to its relentless give attention to monetary return. “From day one, Halter has been constructed round a very sturdy monetary ROI,” he mentioned. “In case you can raise the productiveness of land by 20%, that flows by your complete enterprise.”
Not like most expertise firms, Halter doesn’t view the USA as the middle of its universe. “The U.S. market is essential for us, however it’s not the world’s largest market,” Piggott mentioned. “Agriculture is unfold all over the world, and we have to get there too.” The corporate has now raised roughly $400 million in whole and is prioritizing enlargement throughout the U.S., South America, and Europe.
However the scale of the remaining alternative is maybe greatest captured in a single quantity — one which little doubt resonated with Founders Fund and Halter’s earlier backers, too. Halter’s collar is on a million cattle, whereas there are one billion extra on the planet. With lower than 10% penetration in its house market of New Zealand alone, “We’ve got a protracted technique to go, and loads of product nonetheless to construct,” Piggott mentioned.
You may take heed to our dialog with Piggott on this latest episode of the StrictlyVC Obtain podcast, which drops Tuesdays.
