Founders Fund has made its name backing what Peter Thiel calls “zero-to-one” companies – companies that not only improve on existing ideas but create something entirely new. Its portfolio includes Facebook, SpaceX and Palantir. His latest bet is a New Zealand startup that installs solar-powered smart 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 agentic AI is involved, nor any humanoid robots. There is, however, a very large and largely unresolved problem: how to manage livestock spread across some of the most remote areas on the planet, without dogs, horses, motorcycles or helicopters?
Craig Piggott, Halter’s 30-year-old founder and CEO, 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 re-lay the land. Being able to do that just made perfect sense.”
The system built by Halter 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 24 hours a day and move their herds without ever leaving the farm. The cattle are trained to respond to sound and vibration signals emitted by the collar – a process Piggott compares to the way a car beeps when it approaches a wall while parking. Most animals, he says, learn in three interactions with a virtual fence. “You are then able to guide and move them using sound and vibration alone.”
The collar does more than herd the flock. Because it’s always on and collecting behavioral data, it also tracks animal health, monitors fertility cycles and reports when individual animals may be sick, capabilities that Piggott says have improved significantly as Halter has accumulated what is likely the world’s largest data set on livestock behavior. The company is now in its fifth generation of hardware and its reproduction product is currently in beta with US customers.
“The product breeders are using today is dramatically different than what they were buying a year ago,” Piggott said. “Every week we offer 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 taste of what a tech startup could be like. “Rocket Lab was kind of my introduction to technology, startups and the world of venture capital,” he said. “Realizing that you could raise money, hire a team and pursue an ambitious mission was inspiring. I wanted to do that in agriculture.” He started Halter at age 21. “Probably a little naive in hindsight,” he admitted, “but it was good.”
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Nine years later, the Halter 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 financial 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 that livestock graze more efficiently and leave less grass behind. “In some cases we are seeing customers literally doubling the production on their land,” Piggott said. “The upper ceiling on returns is very, very high.”
Halter isn’t the only one spying on this opportunity. Pharmaceutical giant Merck already makes its own virtual fencing system for livestock, called Vence, and new entrants are also present: at Y Combinator’s latest “demo day,” a startup called Grazemate presented a vision for herding livestock with autonomous drones (no collars needed).
Piggott doesn’t seem bothered by either of them. Asked about drones, he says: “Can I imagine drones playing a small role in the future? Probably. But I don’t think a drone is the right form factor for the central element of the virtual fence. A collar will probably be the right form factor for a very long time.” And when it comes to the overall competitive situation, he says the real obstacle isn’t rival technology at all. “More competition doesn’t change anything,” he said. “He’s doing what you did last year.”
What sets Halter apart, Piggott says, is the sheer technical difficulty of what he spent nine years solving: a system handling a thousand animals must be reliable for several nine hours of uptime, because even a 1 percent failure rate means ten animals are eliminated at any given time. “Achieving these nine levels of reliability 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 an outlier in the agtech sector, which has collapsed in recent years as startups struggled to persuade farmers to adopt new products while managing high operating costs. Piggott attributes Halter’s appeal to its consistent focus on financial performance. “From day one, Halter has been built around a very strong financial return on investment,” he said. “If you can increase land productivity by 20%, that will trickle down to the entire business. »
Unlike most tech companies, Halter doesn’t view the United States as the center of its universe. “The U.S. 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 need to get there too. » The company has now raised approximately $400 million in total and is prioritizing expansion in the United States, South America and Europe.
But the scale of the remaining opportunity is perhaps best summed up in a single number – a number that undoubtedly resonated with the Founders Fund and Halter’s early backers. The Halter collar is present 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 listen to our conversation with Piggott in this new episode of the Strictly VC Download podcast, which comes out on Tuesdays.