Halter: How Solar Cow Collars Built New Zealand’s Agritech Unicorn

Halter is the first New Zealand agricultural technology company to be valued in the billions, and it earned that valuation not by selling software to farmers but by replacing one of farming’s oldest pieces of hardware, the fence. This article explains where the company came from, how virtual fencing works, how Halter makes money, who owns it, what its 2025 and 2026 funding rounds reveal, who its rivals are and what could go wrong. It is part of the New Zealand Company Stories hub.

How did Halter start?

Halter was founded in 2016 by Craig Piggott, who grew up on a Waikato dairy farm, studied engineering and worked briefly at Rocket Lab before leaving, in his early twenties, to build a device that could guide cows without fences or dogs.

The link to Rocket Lab is more than biographical. Mr Piggott has said that watching a New Zealand company attempt something as improbable as orbital launch persuaded him that an ambitious hardware start-up could be built from Auckland. Rocket Lab’s founder became an early backer and director; his own path is described in the profile of Peter Beck, and the company’s history in the article on Rocket Lab.

The problem Mr Piggott chose was one he knew at first hand. Pasture-based dairy farming, the system used on almost all New Zealand farms, depends on moving cows to fresh grass once or twice a day and bringing them to the shed for milking. That means hours of opening gates, shifting temporary electric fences and herding animals, every day, on farms that struggle to recruit staff. Halter spent about five years developing and testing its collar on a handful of farms before selling it widely from 2021.

How does virtual fencing work?

Each cow wears a collar containing GPS, sensors, a solar panel and a small speaker. A farmer draws a boundary on a phone. When a cow approaches it, the collar plays a sound, followed by a mild electrical pulse if she continues.

Cattle learn the association within days, after which sound alone is nearly always enough. The same cues work in reverse: a vibration and a moving boundary prompt the herd to walk to a new paddock or to the milking shed on its own, at a time the farmer has scheduled. The collars communicate through radio towers installed on the farm, so the system does not depend on mobile coverage, which is poor in much of rural New Zealand and worse on American rangeland.

Fencing is only the most visible function. Because the collar records movement and rumination continuously, it can detect when a cow is in heat, lame or falling ill, tasks that otherwise need a skilled stockperson’s eye. Combined with satellite and on-farm pasture data, the app also tells the farmer how much grass is in each paddock and where the herd should graze next.

The gain is in grass. Farmers who can allocate pasture in precise strips, and shift the boundary several times a day at no labour cost, grow and harvest more feed per hectare. Some of Halter’s customers report doubling the productivity of their land, though results vary widely with terrain and management.

How does Halter make money?

Halter charges farmers a monthly subscription for each collared animal rather than selling the hardware outright. Industry reporting puts the fee at roughly US$6 to US$10 per cow a month, depending on herd size and market, plus a one-off charge for towers.

The model resembles software-as-a-service with a physical device attached. Halter keeps ownership of the hardware and replaces or upgrades it, which lowers the upfront cost for the farmer and gives the company recurring revenue. Features are sold in tiers: a farm may start with fencing and shifting, then pay more for health and reproduction monitoring.

The company does not publish its accounts. With about a million collars sold, outside estimates published at the time of the Series E put annualised recurring revenue at somewhere between US$70m and US$100m, which would imply that investors paid more than twenty times revenue. Those figures are estimates, not disclosures, and should be treated with caution.

What Halter has disclosed is retention. One of its investors has said the company went seven consecutive months without losing a customer. That is plausible: once a farm has removed internal fences and reorganised its labour around the collars, switching back is costly.

Who owns and governs Halter?

Halter is a private, venture-backed company headquartered in Auckland. Mr Piggott remains chief executive and a significant shareholder. The rest is held by staff and by venture funds from the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

The investor list is unusual for an agricultural business. Founders Fund, the San Francisco firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, led the Series E. Other backers include Bond, which led the Series D, Bessemer Venture Partners, DCVC, the Australian firm Blackbird, and the New Zealand fund Icehouse Ventures, together with NewView, Ubiquity and Promus. Few of these are specialist farm-technology investors, which is deliberate: Mr Piggott has argued that Halter should not be confined to agritech funds, whose cheques and expectations are smaller.

Because it is private, governance rests with a board of founders and investor representatives rather than with public shareholders, and there is no obligation to publish results. A listing would most likely take place in the United States, for the reasons set out in the article on the NZX’s shrinking market, though the company has announced no such plan.

What were the key strategic turning points?

Four choices shaped Halter: spending five years on development before selling at scale, charging a subscription instead of selling collars, extending from dairy cows to beef cattle, and entering the United States in 2024.

The long development period was expensive but necessary. A collar must survive years of weather, mud and half-tonne animals rubbing against posts, run indefinitely on solar power and behave predictably enough to satisfy animal-welfare regulators. Early versions failed in the field, and the company has described rebuilding the product several times before its commercial release.

Dairy was the natural first market, since dairy cows are valuable, handled daily and kept on intensively managed pasture. Beef opened a much larger one. Beef cattle graze extensive, often rugged country where conventional fencing is costly or impossible, and American ranchers running stock on public land face particular difficulty building fences at all. Halter’s American operation is run from Boulder, Colorado.

The funding history tracks these steps: a first venture round in 2018, progressively larger ones in 2021 and 2023, then US$100m in June 2025 and US$220m in March 2026.

What do the latest numbers show?

In March 2026 Halter raised US$220m, about NZ$377m, at a US$2bn valuation. It reported one million collars sold, more than 2,000 farming customers and over 60,000 miles of virtual fence created, and said it would hire more than 200 people.

The speed is what stands out. The Series D in June 2025 had valued the company at about US$1bn, making it a unicorn. Nine months later the figure had doubled. Over the same period collar numbers grew rapidly, helped by the American launch and by regulatory approval in Australia’s two most populous states.

Penetration at home is already high. About one in ten New Zealand farms running cattle is reported to use Halter. Globally the position is the reverse: there are around 1.5 billion cattle in the world and Halter’s collars are on well under 1% of them. Investors are paying for that gap.

The new money is earmarked for international expansion and for product development in animal health and pasture management. Most of the 200 new roles are in product, engineering and customer support, largely at the Auckland headquarters. That matters locally: Halter is one of very few New Zealand start-ups to keep its engineering base at home while raising American capital on this scale.

Why does Halter matter for New Zealand farming?

Dairy is New Zealand’s largest export industry and is short of labour, under pressure to cut nitrogen run-off and emissions, and limited in how much more land it can use. Halter offers productivity gains from existing pasture without more cows or more staff.

The country’s roughly five million dairy cows supply a co-operative system built around processing scale, described in the article on Fonterra. On the farm, by contrast, technology adoption has been slow. Milking sheds have been automated for decades, but pasture management has still relied on a farmer with a plate meter and a reel of electric tape. Halter digitises that last manual process.

There is an environmental argument too. Virtual fences can keep stock out of waterways and off vulnerable soils without kilometres of permanent fencing, and tighter grazing control reduces waste. Regulators and processors, including companies selling premium milk such as the a2 Milk Company, increasingly ask farmers for evidence of such practices, and collar data can supply it.

Halter is also a signal to the wider economy. New Zealand has long earned its living from agriculture and wondered why it had not produced a farm-technology company of global scale. The answer, it turns out, required a founder who understood both cows and venture capital.

Who are Halter’s competitors?

Halter’s rivals in virtual fencing include Norway’s Nofence, Vence, which is owned by Merck Animal Health, and eShepherd from the New Zealand fencing firm Gallagher. Conventional fencing and cow-monitoring collars without fencing functions are indirect competitors.

The approaches differ. Nofence began with goats and sheep and is strongest in Europe. Vence targets extensive American ranches. Gallagher, a family-owned Hamilton company that pioneered the electric fence in the 1930s, developed eShepherd from Australian government research and can sell through a global dealer network. Monitoring-only collars from dairy-equipment makers detect heat and illness but cannot move cows.

Halter’s advantages are scale and integration. With a million collars it has more behavioural data than its competitors, which improves the algorithms that guide and monitor animals, and it combines fencing, shifting, health and pasture in one subscription. Its disadvantage is cost: the system is priced for intensively managed herds, and cheaper, simpler collars may suit extensive beef operations where each animal earns less.

What are the biggest risks facing Halter?

The principal risks are regulation of electrical cues on animal-welfare grounds, the capital demands of subscription hardware, farm-income cycles that affect customers’ ability to pay, and a valuation that assumes rapid expansion in markets Halter has only just entered.

Regulatory momentum is currently favourable: New South Wales and Victoria have recently opened their markets. But approval is granted jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and the planned moves into Ireland and Britain will test European attitudes.

Farm economics are the second exposure. A subscription of several dollars per cow per month is easy to justify when milk prices are high and harder when they fall, and dairy payouts are volatile. American beef ranchers are currently enjoying record cattle prices, which will not last indefinitely.

Finally there is execution. Supporting hardware on thousands of remote farms across three continents is operationally demanding in a way pure software is not. And a valuation of twenty or more times estimated revenue leaves little tolerance for a slow year. If growth disappoints, a later funding round at a lower price would dilute staff and early investors.

What can founders and CFOs learn from Halter?

Halter shows that deep-technology hardware can be built from a small country if the founder knows the customer’s problem intimately, raises patient capital from generalist investors and prices the product as a service.

• Start with a problem you have lived. Mr Piggott’s upbringing on a dairy farm gave him a customer’s understanding that an outside technologist would have taken years to acquire.
• Take the time the product needs. Five years of development before scaling is unfashionable, but a collar that failed on farms would have destroyed trust in a conservative market.
• Sell the outcome, not the device. A per-cow subscription aligns Halter’s revenue with the farmer’s continued benefit and removes the capital barrier to adoption.
• Raise from the investors your ambition requires. Pitching to generalist technology funds brought larger cheques and higher valuations than sector specialists would offer.
• Use a concentrated home market as a proving ground. Reaching one farm in ten in New Zealand gave Halter data, references and revenue before it crossed an ocean.

For finance chiefs, the caution concerns capital intensity. Each new customer requires hardware to be built and shipped before the first payment arrives, so faster growth consumes more cash, the reverse of a pure software business such as Xero.

What happens next for Halter?

Halter plans to launch in Ireland and Britain during 2026, deepen its presence in the United States and Canada, explore South America, and add animal-health and pasture features that raise the revenue earned from each collar.

America is the main prize. It has roughly 90 million cattle, large ranches where fencing is expensive, and federal grazing land where it is restricted. If Halter can reach even a small percentage of that herd, its revenue would be several times today’s. South America, with Brazil’s vast beef industry, is a longer-term prospect in which price sensitivity will be the obstacle.

The other open question is the exit. At a US$2bn valuation, with late-stage American funds on the register, an initial public offering within a few years is the conventional expectation, and it would probably be in New York. An acquisition by an animal-health or farm-machinery multinational is conceivable but would need a very large cheque. Whatever the route, the company has already changed what New Zealand investors believe an agricultural start-up can be worth.

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