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.

Piggott grew up on a dairy farm in the Waikato, where the daily realities of livestock farming, the physical work, the time-critical tasks, the constant managing of where animals graze, were simply life. After studying engineering, he took a job at Rocket Lab, spending an intense stretch building satellites under Peter Beck. It was his introduction to high-growth technology, venture capital and the idea that a New Zealand company could aim at something enormous. But farming kept pulling at him and in 2016 he left to start Halter.

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. Working with co-founder Max Olson and 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 parents’ 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. The company has scaled across New Zealand, Australia and the United States and in 2026 raised a US million Series E that valued it at around US billion. In 2026 Piggott was named Innovator of the Year at the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Awards.

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: University of Auckland · TechCrunch · Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year