Flox Intelligence is building AI to keep wildlife away from trains, airports, and roads

Key points

• Flox Intelligence, a 2020 spinout from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, makes edge devices that identify wildlife and emit species-appropriate sounds to deter animals from infrastructure.
• The FAA estimates wildlife strikes cost U.S. civil aviation about $272 million a year on average between 1990 and 2025, while SNCF says wandering animals affect more than 8,000 trains in France each year.
• Flox has raised about $5 million in pre-seed and seed funding and is opening a $10 million Series A to scale from roughly 150 devices to several thousand units.

Flox Intelligence, a startup spun out of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2020, is developing AI-powered edge devices to keep wildlife away from trains, airports and roads. The company, founded by Sara Nozkova after 13 years in transportation and autonomous vehicles, is a finalist at this year's Startup Battlefield 200 pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt, held at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 13 to 15.

The problem is costly. The FAA estimates 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 and are among its five leading causes of delays. In Brittany, 120 trains hit animals in 2023 alone, disrupting 660 services and causing more than 15,000 minutes of delays.

How the system works

Flox makes edge devices that process data on-site rather than in the cloud. A motion sensor wakes the device when it detects movement, triggering a camera that uses on-device models to identify nearby animals. The device then emits a species-appropriate sound to scare them away. Nozkova says the system learns from experience and varies its responses so animals do not get habituated to repeated signals.

The company sells battery-operated devices that can be mounted on poles, trees and other structures, along with a software platform showing clients where devices are deployed and what is happening on the ground. The platform can also generate reports for regulatory compliance and biodiversity monitoring. The longer-term goal is to make the software portable enough to run on machines that work outside, including trains, cars and drones.

Physical AI is walking out of the factory and into the messy, alive outdoors

— Sara Nozkova

Deployment and funding

Nozkova says about 150 Flox devices are live in North America, Europe and Australia at airfields and airport perimeters, road and rail corridors, national parks, agricultural land, urban areas, mining sites and critical infrastructure such as electrical substations. The company sells edge units up front, then charges an annual software and AI subscription after the first year. It also has OEM partnerships, including with train manufacturer Alstom, which pay an annual fee to deploy its software on vehicles.

Flox expects to end 2026 with revenue of about $1.5 million, Nozkova said. The company has raised about $5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, with the seed round led by Unconventional Ventures and Tilia Impact Ventures. Co-investors include GENIUS NY, Norrsken, Satgana and angel investors. Flox is now opening a $10 million Series A, mostly to grow from about 150 devices to several thousand deployed units and extend the underlying system beyond its current wildlife use cases.