Founders Fund has made its name backing what Peter Thiel calls “zero to one” companies — businesses that don’t just improve on existing ideas but create something entirely new. Its portfolio includes Facebook, SpaceX, and Palantir. Its latest bet is a New Zealand startup that puts solar-powered smart collars on cows.
Halter, which 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 technology headlines. There is no agentic AI involved, no humanoid robots. There is, however, a very large and largely unsolved problem: How do you manage cattle spread across some of the most remote terrain on earth, without dogs, horses, motorbikes, or helicopters?
Craig Piggott, Halter’s 30-year-old founder and CEO, has spent nine years working on an answer. “If you manage 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 animals graze and how you rest the land. Being able to do that virtually just made a lot of sense.”
The system Halter has built combines a solar-powered collar, a network of low-frequency towers, and a smartphone app to let farmers create virtual fences, monitor every animal around the clock, and move their herds without ever leaving the farmhouse. Cattle are trained to respond to audio and vibration cues from the collar — a process Piggott that likens to the way a car beeps as it approaches a wall while parking. Most animals, he says, learn within three interactions with a virtual fence. “Then you’re able to guide t …