Craig Piggott started Halter as a side project while still at Rocket Lab, then left in his early twenties to build it. Nine years later it is worth US$2 billion.
The product
Halter makes solar powered AI collars for cows. GPS, audio cues and gentle vibrations create virtual fences. A farmer can move an entire herd from a smartphone. No wire fences, no dogs, far less labour.
The pace
- 9 years to reach a US$1B valuation
- 9 more months to add the second billion
- US$220M Series E, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund
- One of the largest VC raises ever for a New Zealand founded company
The scale
Over 1 million collars sold across 2,000+ ranches in New Zealand, Australia and the US. Halter says American ranchers have built nearly 100,000km of virtual fencing in under two years.
The part most people miss
Halter charges per cow, per month. It looks like a hardware company that sells a device once. It is not. Every cow is a recurring line item. Add a cow, add revenue.
The collars are also always on, tracking animal health and behaviour around the clock. Halter has likely built the largest dataset of cattle behaviour in the world. Software gets copied overnight. A nine year head start in cattle data does not.
Piggott has said he never saw Halter strictly as an agtech company, and did not only pitch agtech investors. That is why Founders Fund led the round, not an agriculture fund.
My read
He did not build a better cow collar. He built a software company that happens to live on a cow. The next billion dollar ANZ company probably looks like this: physical, niche, and ignored by everyone chasing the obvious.