Flox Intelligence Raises $5M to Teach Machines to Scare Wildlife

Wildlife strikes cost U.S. civil aviation an average of $272 million a year between 1990 and 2025, according to FAA estimates — and a Stockholm startup has built an AI system to cut that bill. Flox Intelligence makes edge devices that identify animals on-site and scare them away with species-specific sound. The company has raised about $5 million and is now opening a $10 million Series A, founder Sara Nozkova told TechCrunch.

Flox is one of the finalists at this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, running at Moscone West in San Francisco through October 15. The company pitched a panel of VC judges on Tuesday.

Why existing deterrents fail

The problem spans continents and transport modes. France's rail operator SNCF says wandering animals affect more than 8,000 trains a year and rank 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.

Operators traditionally rely on sirens, lights, fences, falcons and culling. Nozkova, who spent 13 years in transportation and autonomous vehicles, considers that approach exhausted. "I was convinced the answer was not a louder deterrent," she told TechCrunch.

Her years in autonomy shaped the diagnosis. "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."

How the system works

Nozkova joined the AI lab at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and built a system that changes its deterrent response based on what a nearby animal is doing — and which species it is. That work spun out as Flox Intelligence in 2020.

The mechanics are straightforward:

• A motion sensor wakes the battery-operated device when it detects movement.
• A camera uses on-device models, not the cloud, to identify the animal.
• The device emits a species-appropriate sound to drive it away.
• The system varies its responses over time so animals do not become habituated to repeated signals.

Devices mount on poles, trees and other structures. A software platform shows clients where units are deployed and what is happening on the ground. It also generates reports for regulatory compliance and biodiversity monitoring.

Where the devices run — and who pays

About 150 Flox devices are live in North America, Europe and Australia, according to Nozkova. Deployment sites include:

• Airfields and airport perimeters
• Road and rail corridors, especially fence ends and wildlife crossings
• National parks and agricultural land
• Urban areas, mining sites and critical infrastructure such as electrical substations

The business model has two streams. Flox sells edge units upfront, then charges an annual software and AI subscription after the first year. It also signs OEM partnerships, where companies pay an annual fee to run its software on vehicles such as trains. Train manufacturer Alstom is one such partner.

The company expects to end 2026 with revenue of about $1.5 million, Nozkova said.

Who is the competition?

Flox is not alone in the market. Robin Radar's Scarecrow uses species-specific distress calls to disperse birds and records the activity. iCHASE detects birds with computer vision and targets them with a moving laser, adjusting its response as needed.

Nozkova argues Flox's moat is breadth plus field data — what she calls "ground truth on what actually makes a moose or a grizzly bear move safely."

Her larger bet extends beyond wildlife deterrence. "Physical AI is walking out of the factory and into the messy, alive outdoors," she said. "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."

What the Series A buys

The $5 million raised so far spans pre-seed and seed rounds. Unconventional Ventures and Tilia Impact Ventures led the seed; GENIUS NY, Norrsken, Satgana and angel investors co-invested across the rounds, Nozkova said.

The $10 million Series A would mostly fund growth from about 150 devices to several thousand deployed units, and extend the underlying system beyond its current wildlife use cases. The long-term goal is software portable enough to run on outdoor machines — trains, cars and drones — turning a niche deterrent product into a perception layer for anything that works outside.