Halter at 8: The untold story behind one of NZ’s most successful start-ups

Craig Piggott founded smart cow-collar company Halter eight years ago while he was working at Sir Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab and now it’s expanding into the United States. The 30-year-old talks to Chris Keall about his journey so far - including the hairy moments in its early days.

“I stumped up the courage to tell Pete one day,” says Halter founder Craig Piggott, remembering the moment he decided to confess his side hustle.

He had landed at Sir Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab after growing up the child of Waikato share milkers, watching his parents work 100-hour weeks.

Piggott did a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Auckland and in his final year, 2016, started working for Rocket Lab. At the time, Beck’s start-up had just 60 or so staff (today it boasts close to 2000).

“It was about two years before the first [rocket] launch.”

Visiting home, Piggott says it struck him that while Beck was reinventing aerospace with Rocket Lab, “in farming – the backbone of New Zealand – we didn’t have anyone trying to do the same thing”.

"If I knew then what I know now, in terms of what we had to solve in the beginning, there’s no way I would have started Halter," says founder Craig Piggott, pictured with one of his firm's smart collars. Photo / Jason Oxenham

He adds, “When you’ve left farming and come back, [you] look at things differently and ask, ‘Why are we doing things this way?’” He came up with the idea for a GPS-tracking smart collar for cows – so that via a smartphone each animal could be located, then nudged to where the farmer wants them using vibrations and audio cues; a system of “virtual fencing” rather than the No 8 wire kind.

“I’d been secretly working on it in my spare time which you don’t have a lot of when you’re working at Rocket Lab,” Piggott says.

“I had a prototype. And I had enough confidence it could work. So I gave Peter a call and said, ‘I want to start this company, Halter’.

“I thought it would be logical for him to say. ‘I’m pretty busy – and it sounds like you’re pretty busy as well, so see you later’.” (Beck, although a self-described introvert, has a reputation as a demanding taskmaster.)

“But instead he cleared his calendar. We spent hours going through the whole thing, end to end.”

Beck became one of Halter’s founding directors and one of the nascent firm’s first financial backers.

‘$50m more than we thought’

It was the best possible start.

But in hindsight, Piggott says he was blissfully ignorant.

“Building Halter has been twice as hard as we thought it would be. It cost us at least $50 million more than we thought to actually start selling.”

Piggott and a handful of early staff shared a cramped office in the attic of an ageing building in Auckland’s CBD; his parents’ farm became the testbed.

"The first five years of Halter was fighting fire after fire, resulting in some hard lessons - like testing to see whether solar-powered batteries would last through our first winter on-farm. They didn't" - Piggott.

The hard graft began.

There were around 30 “unique and really hard” engineering problems, Piggott says. One was the solar panels that power Halter’s collars.

“It wasn’t until our fourth-generation hardware that we really worked out how to make a collar that would be durable enough and light enough and cheap enough to be commercially scalable.

“At that point, we’d built hundreds if not thousands of prototypes over years, working every night, every weekend.

Piggott (right) with three of his key backers: David Cowan, a partner at US venture capital firm and major Rocket Lab shareholder Bessemer; mentor and investor Sir Peter Beck; and Bessemer partner Tess Hatch.

“It was crazy. It was a lot of fun. It was naivety that got us through those days – If I knew then what I know now, in terms of what we had to solve in the beginning, there’s no way I would have started Halter.”

He gives an example. “If you think about the use-case for a solar panel, they sit on roofs typically. They’re not designed to go on a cow to be rubbed against trees or concrete troughs.”

"Like many start-up concepts, people thought I was crazy for years and said Halter would never, ever work," Piggott says. "As Pete Beck told me in that first year: 'Everyone calls you crazy until you do it, then they call it vision'."

Piggott and his team finally cracked it after meeting with specialist bulletproof glass manufacturers.

Then there was the art of tying it together and convincing farmers to take it on.

“I remember our first Fieldays. Over half the farmers who walked past were like, ‘No way. You’re crazy. Like that’ll never work’.

“We had just got it to work ourselves. At the first farm we ever launched at, it took us three months to train their cows. It was only 200 cows, but we had three people there every day.” (Today, Halter has a seven-day, “farmer-led” induction.)

Investors chip in $124m

Luckily for Piggott – or as a reward for his hard graft and smarts – his firm has been able to raise far more than $50m.

Piggott – pictured with his calf Twinkle – grew up around the Waikato as his parents, who worked as share milkers, moved from farm to farm.

Halter’s Series A raise in 2018 brought in $7m from backers including Beck, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 and the Chicago-based Promus Ventures (one of Rocket Lab’s early backers).

A $32m Series B round in 2021, led by Australasian venture capital firm Blackbird, was used to boost staff numbers from 60 to 115 and to start piloting Halter’s product on a clutch of Waikato farms.

Piggott's parents eventually bought a small farm near Morrinsville, which is also used as Halter's research farm. He's pictured during a recent visit.

And in March 2023, Halter hauled in $85m in a bumper Series C round that included Bessemer Venture Partners – one of the largest American VC firms and one of Rocket Lab’s first major offshore backers - and supported by others including Auckland-based Icehouse Ventures, which chipped in “more than $25m” as it made its single biggest investment to date, Silicon Valley-based DCVC (yet another Rocket Lab backer) and Beck, who chipped in more funds.

The 2023 investment round was particularly notable because, by that point, the venture capital boom fuelled by low interest rates over the pandemic stimulus years had turned into a bust – at least for most start-ups seeking fresh capital.

“Last year alone, we added or trained 100,000 cows. It was that momentum that laid the foundation for the raise,” Piggott told the Herald at the time.

Piggott (left) with Halter beef cattle specialist Phathisa Khumalo in the firm's R&D lab. The chambers at the rear are used to bake the collars as part of a process to simulate long-term wear and tear. The product is also dunked in a high-pressure water tank as part of the same assessment process. Photo / Jason Oxenham

It had also spread throughout the country, with the South Island’s Ngāi Tahu Farming emerging as one of its hero customers after being one of the first to take on the technology.

Today, Piggott won’t offer more than that Halter has continued its rapid growth and is now on “hundreds of farms”. The privately held firm also keeps its revenue and profit/loss numbers close – but they’ve been sufficiently impressive for the likes of Bessemer to write big cheques during a VC downturn.

The animal welfare issue

Halter’s collars use sound and vibration cues to teach a cow to recognise a virtual paddock, and which way a farmer wants them to move.

“The collar also uses a secondary cue, a low energy electric pulse that is used to reinforce the primary cues if cows ignore them,” the firm says in an explanatory video (above).

Delivering livestock electric shocks is nothing new, of course.

Waikato dairy farmer Bill Gallagher was credited with inventing the electric fence in the 1930s – then popularising it with the firm that still bears his name.

Piggott: "The default is often to live life comfortably. To me, that’s disastrous. If you don’t take some hard risks, you won't reap the rewards. Tour de France cyclist Greg LeMond said: 'It never gets easier - you just go faster'. It's the same for a startup." Photo / Jason Oxenham

But of course cows can see a physical fence. Is it a bit rough on the animal to have to work out where a virtual one lies, and receive a jolt if it gets it wrong?

Piggott says the pulse is only a hundredth of that delivered by an electric fence. He adds that cows are smart. Most can learn to follow the sonic cues and gentle vibrations within a couple of days, alleviating the need for any pulses at all (the training programme lasts seven days overall).

Nevertheless, Halter’s first offshore foray, into Australia, was restricted to Tasmania because animal welfare rules in other states prevented its product.

“Those laws weren’t aimed at us; they predate Halter,” Piggott says. He wants to work constructively, where Halter can, to modernise the rules, he says.

Halter is also pitched as a tool to improve herd welfare. The collar’s AI alerts a farmer to unusual behaviour, which could indicate if an animal is sick or on heat. The firm says it also helps human welfare, saving a farmer an average of 20 hours per week.

Halter exhibited at the AgMedia Summit in Kansas City, Missouri this week.

US launch

Halter has just launched into North America – a territory many Kiwis would associate with images of industrial farming.

“Even though a lot of that market is feed lots, all those animals still start on grass. They’re still grazing or pasture-based at some point in their life,” Piggott says.

It’s typical for a cow to spend the first two years of its life grazing in open pasture, he says, meaning around two-thirds of the US herd is actually outside of battery farming.

What’s next?

Today, Halter has around 180 staff, with Piggott looking to hire a further 40 as soon as possible.

The founder says he’s after high achievers, whether they made their bones in mechanical engineering or sales or something completely unrelated like law. He figures that if they’re smart at one thing, they’ll be smart at another.

Right now, the US launch is at the front of his mind, but his team is already white-boarding a possible launch into another huge beef market: Brazil.

At the end of last year, the firm expanded from dairy into beef.

It also recently released an AI-based app to help farmers monitor and improve pasture.

Piggott positions it as part of Halter serving as “an operating system for a farm”.

His new fear

The firm has just turned eight, while Piggott celebrated his own milestone, turning 30 last month.

His horizons are getting bigger.

In some ways, literally.

Halter has just signed its first customers at ranches in Oregon, Colorado, Louisiana and other US states, including what its founder calls the “holy grail of pasture”, Texas.

“Some of their ranches would cover all of Auckland and half of the Waikato,” he says.

He paints the North American launch as inevitable.

“New Zealand start-ups simply cannot afford to think small if they want to make it globally,” he says.

“We were always going to do the US. If you’re going to build a global company, you have to. So it was always a question of when, not if. But this next chapter is going to be hard. So now my new challenge - or fear - is: will we crack it?”

Craig Piggott

• Age: 30
• Grew up in Morrinsville, Waikato and graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Engineering with First Class Honours
• Student job: Product development engineer, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare. First job: Mechanical engineer, Rocket Lab
• Founder and CEO of smart collar and farm management firm Halter, with 180 staff across NZ, Australia and the US
• Last book read: Showing Up: Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable by Ned Brockmann
• Last movie watched: Last Dance
• Last overseas holiday: Partner’s birthday in Byron Bay

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.