Flox Intelligence, a startup that spun out of a Swedish university, is building artificial intelligence to keep wild animals away from trains, airports, and roads. The company is a finalist in the Startup Battlefield 200 pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, which runs October 13 to 15.
Wildlife collisions are costly. The FAA estimates that wildlife strikes cost U.S. civil aviation about $272 million a year on average between 1990 and 2025.
In France, rail operator SNCF says wandering animals affect more than 8,000 trains each year. In Brittany, 120 trains hit animals in 2023, disrupting 660 services and causing more than 15,000 minutes of delays.
How the Flox Intelligence System Works
Founder Sara Nozkova spent 13 years working in transportation and autonomous vehicles. She said tools like sirens, lights, fences, and culling were not the answer. “I was convinced the answer was not a louder deterrent,” she told TechCrunch.
Nozkova joined the AI lab at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. There she worked on a system that changes its response based on the type of animal and what it is doing. Flox spun out of KTH in 2020.
The company makes edge devices that process data on-site instead of in the cloud. A motion sensor wakes the device when it detects movement. A camera then uses on-device models to identify the animal.
The device plays a sound chosen for that species to scare it away. Nozkova said the system learns over time and varies its responses so animals do not get used to the same signals.
The battery-powered units can be mounted on poles, trees, and other structures. A software platform shows clients where devices are placed and creates reports for regulatory compliance and biodiversity monitoring.
About 150 Flox devices are now running in North America, Europe, and Australia. They are used at airports, road and rail corridors, national parks, farms, mining sites, and electrical substations.
Revenue, Partners, and Funding
Flox sells its devices up front and charges an annual software and AI subscription after the first year. It also has partnerships with companies that pay a yearly fee to run its software on vehicles such as trains. Train maker Alstom is one of those partners.
The company expects to end 2026 with about $1.5 million in revenue, Nozkova said.
Flox faces competition. Robin Radar’s Scarecrow uses species-specific distress calls to move birds away. iCHASE uses computer vision to detect birds and targets them with a moving laser.
Nozkova said her company’s edge is the breadth of its system and the field data it has gathered. She called it “ground truth on what actually makes a moose or a grizzly bear move safely.”
“Physical AI is walking out of the factory and into the messy, alive outdoors,” Nozkova said. She added that machines working outside, from trains to drones, will need to understand nature.
Flox has raised about $5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds. The seed round was led by Unconventional Ventures and Tilia Impact Ventures. Other investors include GENIUS NY, Norrsken, Satgana, and angel investors.
The company is now opening a $10 million Series A round. Most of the money would go toward growing from about 150 devices to several thousand units and extending the system beyond its current wildlife uses.
