Flox Intelligence AI: Keeping Wildlife Away From Trains and Roads
Flox Intelligence AI is building technology to keep wildlife away from trains, airports, and roads. The startup, spun out of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, uses edge devices trained on animal behavior to prevent collisions that cost millions of dollars and countless animal lives every year. The company is a finalist at this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 pitch competition.
The Scale of Wildlife Collisions
Wildlife strikes with infrastructure are a global problem. The FAA estimates that wildlife strikes have 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 across the country each year and are among its five leading causes of delays. In Brittany alone, 120 trains hit animals in 2023, disrupting 660 services and causing more than 15,000 minutes of delays.
These numbers represent both economic loss and ecological harm. Traditional solutions like sirens, lights, fences, falcons, and culling have not solved the problem. Sara Nozkova, the founder of Flox Intelligence, believed there had to be a better way.
A Different Approach to Wildlife Deterrence
“I was convinced the answer was not a louder deterrent,” Nozkova said. After spending 13 years working in transportation and autonomous vehicles, she had learned how quickly systems designed for controlled environments fail when nature enters the equation.
“We have taught machines to be brilliant, but only inside the environments we engineered for them,” she said. “Cities, factory lines, warehouses. Fixed geometry, known objects. Stepping outside into nature, I saw firsthand how the same machines quickly go blind. Because nature is complex and always alive.”
That insight led her to the AI lab at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where she began developing a system that could change its deterrent responses based on what an animal nearby is doing, and even what kind of animal it is. That work became Flox Intelligence, which spun out of KTH in 2020.
How Flox Intelligence AI Works
Flox Intelligence AI makes edge devices that process data on-site rather than in the cloud. Like autonomous vehicles, they use perception systems to sense their surroundings, but theirs are trained on wildlife behavior.
The process works in three steps:
A motion sensor wakes the device when it detects movement.
A camera uses on-device models to identify nearby animals.
The device 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. This adaptive approach is what sets Flox Intelligence apart from static deterrents like sirens or lights.
Products and Deployment
The company currently sells battery-operated devices that can be mounted on poles, trees, and other structures. It also offers a software platform that shows clients where devices are deployed and what is happening on the ground. The platform can generate reports for regulatory compliance and for uses like biodiversity monitoring.
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 longer-term goal is to make the software portable enough to run on machines that work outside, including trains, cars, and drones.
Business Model and Revenue
Flox Intelligence sells edge units up front, then charges an annual software and AI subscription after the first year. The company also has OEM partnerships with companies that pay an annual fee to deploy its software on vehicles, like trains. Train manufacturer Alstom is one such partner.
The company expects to end 2026 with revenue of about $1.5 million**, Nozkova said. It has raised about **$5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds so far, with the seed round led by Unconventional Ventures and Tilia Impact Ventures. Co-investors across the rounds include GENIUS NY, Norrsken, Satgana, and angel investors.
Flox Intelligence is now opening a $10 million Series A, which would mostly go toward growing from about 150 devices to several thousand deployed units and extending the underlying system beyond its current wildlife use cases.
Competition and the Road Ahead
Flox Intelligence is not alone in this space. Other companies are developing systems that use species-specific distress calls or computer vision with lasers to deter birds. Nozkova says her moat is the breadth of the system and the data Flox has collected in the field, which she calls “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 says. “Every machine that operates outside — trains, trucks, drones, tractors, robots — will need to understand nature, and nature intelligence is the next layer of the perception stack. Almost nobody is building it.”
Why This Matters
Wildlife-vehicle collisions are a growing problem worldwide. As human infrastructure expands into natural habitats, the need for intelligent, humane solutions becomes more urgent. Flox Intelligence AI offers a promising approach: instead of trying to overpower nature with louder sounds or stronger fences, it uses AI to understand animal behavior and respond accordingly.
