First light. North Waikato.
SkyDrover moves cattle with autonomous drones. Same job a good stockman does. Run it from your phone.
Most of New Zealand's cattle herd is still moved the same way it was a century ago: people, dogs, motorbikes, and the occasional helicopter. It works. It's also expensive, physically punishing, and getting harder to staff every year.
A typical hill-country muster pulls 3–6 people off other work for most of a day. Labour is the single biggest cost on most grazing operations, and it's only getting tighter.
Skilled stockmen are retiring faster than farms can replace them. Rural unemployment is low and the people who know how to handle stock are getting older.
A helicopter muster runs $1,500–$4,000 a day. Bikes are cheaper but you still need a crew, and a working farm moves stock hundreds of times a year.
A traditional muster captures nothing. Between manual checks, no one knows where the mob is, how it's tracking, or what the pasture is doing.
Rushed handling stresses cattle, which means weight loss, injury, and slower regain. Doing it properly takes time, skill, and good conditions — all in short supply.
The drone launches itself and sweeps the property, finding cattle on camera and pinning them on the map in real time.
Pick the destination paddock on your phone. SkyDrover works out the route — gates, terrain, water crossings, the lot.
The drone applies pressure the way a stockman would. It reads the mob, adjusts altitude, speed, and angle, and moves them without rushing them.
Every flight logs pasture condition, head count, animal behaviour, and GPS trails. It's on your dashboard by the time you're back at the shed.
Live herd position overlaid on satellite imagery of your property. Know exactly where your cattle are at any moment, from anywhere.
NDVI cover estimates and condition scores from every flight, no extra work. You end up with a year-on-year picture of how the land is performing.
No pilot certificate needed. Mark the paddock boundaries once; SkyDrover handles launch, flight, herding, and getting itself home.
Pressure, pace, and angle tuned from cattle behaviour research. Stock arrive calm: no running, no splits, no injuries.
Map the whole farm, schedule rotational moves, and let repeat musters run on a calendar.
Hill country signal can be patchy. The drone runs offline and syncs everything once it's back in coverage.
New Zealand is the right place to do this first. Pastoral farming is a huge slice of the economy, the labour shortage is real and getting worse, and the regulator is reasonable about commercial drone work. Sheep and beef farms cover about half the country's farmland, and most of them muster something almost every day.
We're starting with hill-country beef and sheep — the places where the country is steepest, labour is hardest to find, and a missed muster hurts the most. From there, the rest of the market.
Talk to our teamCS & Mathematics at Columbia. Has built LLM and applied ML systems hands-on, including RAG pipelines evaluated on 500K-sample benchmarks and segmentation models for medical imaging. IMO Honourable Mention.
Built and launched Vibe Terminal, an AI-native trading platform, in three months; 20+ users on live trading infrastructure. Previously founded WellPulse, raising NZD 60,000 for healthcare projects.
We're running paid pilots with 12 farms across the Waikato and Canterbury from mid-2025. Pilot farms get reduced pricing, a direct line to us, and real input into what we build next.
