First light · Block 3-North · Waikato
SkyDrover guides cattle with autonomous drones — the way an experienced stockman would, from the palm of your hand.
New Zealand's 12 million-strong cattle herd is largely managed the same way it was a century ago — people, dogs, motorbikes, and the occasional helicopter. It works, but it's expensive, physically demanding, and impossible to scale as farm labour dries up.
The average hill-country muster requires 3–6 people, multiple horses or bikes, and most of the day. Labour is the biggest cost on most grazing operations — and it's only getting harder to find.
Rural labour shortages are accelerating. Skilled stockmen are retiring faster than farms can replace them, leaving properties understaffed at critical times.
Helicopter mustering can cost $1,500–$4,000 per day. Even quad-bike operations require multiple staff and significant time — costs that compound over hundreds of moves per year.
Traditional mustering captures nothing. Farmers have no record of herd location, condition, or pasture state between manual checks — decisions are made blind.
Rushed or poorly executed musters can stress cattle, causing weight loss and injury. Low-stress handling requires time, skill, and ideal conditions — all scarce.
The drone launches autonomously and sweeps the property, using computer vision to locate cattle and map their position in real time.
Select the destination paddock on your phone. SkyDrover plots the optimal route, accounting for gates, terrain, and water crossings.
The drone applies controlled positional pressure — adjusting altitude, speed, and angle the way a skilled stockman reads a mob and responds to it.
Every flight logs pasture condition, herd count, animal behaviour scores, and GPS movement trails — automatically synced to your dashboard.
Live herd position overlaid on satellite imagery of your property. Know exactly where your cattle are at any moment, from anywhere.
NDVI-based pasture cover estimates and condition scores collected passively on every flight. Build a year-on-year picture of your land.
No pilot certificate required. Define paddock boundaries once — SkyDrover handles launch, navigation, herding, and safe return automatically.
Pressure, pace, and position calibrated from cattle behaviour science. Animals arrive calm — no running, no splitting, no injuries.
Map your entire property, schedule rotational grazing sequences, and automate repeat moves on a calendar — set it and forget it.
Built for remote hill country with patchy connectivity. Operations run offline; data syncs to the cloud when signal returns.
New Zealand is the ideal proving ground: a world-leading pastoral farming sector, a worsening skilled-labour shortage, and a regulatory environment that supports commercial drone operations. Sheep-and-beef farms cover roughly half the country's agricultural land, and mustering is a near-daily operational cost for most of them.
We're starting with hill-country beef and sheep operations — properties where the terrain is hardest to work, labour is scarcest, and the pain of a failed or delayed muster is most acute. Our goal is to be the default mustering tool for New Zealand farms.
Talk to our teamCS & Mathematics at Columbia, with hands-on experience building LLM and applied ML systems — from RAG pipelines evaluated on 500K-sample benchmarks to ML models for medical image segmentation. IMO Honourable Mention.
Built and launched Vibe Terminal, an AI-native trading platform, in three months — onboarding 20+ users with live trading infrastructure. Previously founded WellPulse, raising NZD 60,000 for healthcare projects.
We're running paid pilot trials with 12 farms across the Waikato and Canterbury from mid-2025. Pilots get reduced pricing, direct line to the founding team, and a stake in shaping the product.
