Craig Piggott

Craig Piggott is a New Zealand entrepreneur and the founder and chief executive of Halter, the agritech company whose solar-powered smart collars and virtual fencing have made it one of the country's most valuable startups.

Who is Craig Piggott?

Piggott was born around 1994 and grew up near Matamata in the Waikato, the son of sharemilkers who later bought their own dairy farm. The daily realities of livestock farming, the physical work, the time-critical tasks and the constant managing of where animals graze, were simply life. He boarded at St Peter's School in Cambridge, then studied mechanical engineering at the University of Auckland, and in his final year took a job at Rocket Lab, spending about nine months building satellites under Peter Beck. It was his introduction to high-growth technology and venture capital, but farming kept pulling at him, and in 2016, aged twenty-one, he left to start Halter.

What is Halter and how do the smart collars work?

The premise was deceptively simple. On a pasture-based farm, fences are the main lever a farmer has: they decide where animals graze and how the land gets rested. Piggott's idea was to make that lever virtual. With Beck as one of his first backers, he built a system combining a solar-powered collar, a network of on-farm towers and a smartphone app, guiding cattle with sound and vibration cues rather than wire. Most cows, he has said, learn to respond within a few interactions. What began as collars trained on his family's farm has become, by Halter's own account, the world's smartest farm-management system for dairy and beef cattle, handling virtual fencing, remote herd movement, pasture allocation and round-the-clock animal-health monitoring.

How much has Halter raised and what is it worth?

Halter has scaled across New Zealand, Australia and the United States on the back of a series of large capital raises. In March 2026 it closed a Series E of US$220 million (about NZ$377 million), led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, that valued the company at roughly US$2 billion (around NZ$3.4 billion), one of the largest agritech rounds on record. Earlier backers include Bond, Blackbird, DCVC and Bessemer, alongside Beck.

What is Craig Piggott's net worth?

There is no reliable public figure for Craig Piggott's net worth. As founder and chief executive he is Halter's largest individual shareholder, so on paper his stake in a company valued at about US$2 billion is substantial, but Halter is privately held and he has raised capital by selling equity along the way, which dilutes any founder's holding. Any precise personal-wealth number attached to his name online is an estimate rather than a disclosed fact. In 2026 he was named Innovator of the Year at the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Awards, having earlier made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2021.

Piggott's profile is noteworthy because he connects two New Zealand strengths that rarely meet: deep farming heritage and serious deep technology. He didn't chase a trend; he took a problem he understood from childhood and rebuilt it in software. His work is explored further in Halter: the New Zealand agritech startup changing how farmers manage livestock and How Halter is turning farms into software-enabled businesses.

Sources: Wikipedia · University of Auckland · Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year

Craig Piggott features in our guide to the most famous New Zealand entrepreneurs.