Wildlife costs infrastructure dearly every year. According to the FAA, 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 a year and rank among its five leading causes of delay. In Brittany alone, 120 trains hit animals in 2023, disrupting 660 services and causing more than 15,000 minutes of delay.
That damage is what led to Flox Intelligence. Founder Sara Nozkova, who spent 13 years in transportation and autonomous vehicles, worked at the AI lab of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm on a system that changes its response based on what an animal is doing and what kind of animal it is. "I was convinced the answer was not a louder deterrent," she told TechCrunch. "We have taught machines to be brilliant, but only inside the environments we engineered for them. Nature is complex and always alive."
The company, a KTH spin-out founded in 2020, makes edge devices that process data on-site rather than in the cloud. A motion sensor wakes the unit, a camera running on-device models identifies nearby animals, and the device plays a sound suited to the species to scare them off. The system learns from experience and varies its responses so animals don't get used to repeated signals.
Flox currently sells battery-powered units that mount on poles, trees and other structures, along with a software platform that shows where devices are deployed and what is happening on the ground. The platform can also generate compliance and biodiversity reports. The longer-term goal is to run the software on machines that work outdoors, including trains, cars and drones.
Nozkova says about 150 Flox devices are live across North America, Europe and Australia, at airfields, road and rail corridors, national parks, farmland, urban areas, mines and critical infrastructure such as electrical substations. The business model sells units up front and then charges an annual software and AI subscription after the first year. Flox also has OEM partnerships in which companies pay an annual fee to deploy its software on vehicles; train maker Alstom is one partner.
The company expects to close 2026 with revenue of about $1.5 million. It has raised about $5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, with the seed led by Unconventional Ventures and Tilia Impact Ventures. It is now opening a $10 million Series A, mainly to grow from about 150 devices to several thousand and to extend the system beyond its current wildlife uses.
Competition exists. Robin Radar also uses species-specific distress calls to disperse birds and records the activity, while another system detects birds with computer vision and targets them with a moving laser. Nozkova says Flox's edge lies in the breadth of its system and the field data it has collected, which she calls "ground truth on what actually makes a moose or a grizzly bear move safely."
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