Flox Intelligence raises $10M Series A to scale AI wildlife deterrents

Wildlife strikes cost U.S. civil aviation an average of $272 million per year between 1990 and 2025, according to FAA estimates — and that figure frames why a Stockholm startup called Flox Intelligence is now opening a $10 million Series A. The company, which spun out of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2020, builds battery-operated edge devices (units that process data on-site rather than in the cloud) that identify animals with on-device AI models and scare them away with species-appropriate sounds.

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

Why wildlife costs infrastructure operators millions

The stakes extend beyond aviation. In France, rail operator SNCF says wandering animals affect more than 8,000 trains each 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.

Founder Sara Nozkova spent 13 years working in transportation and autonomous vehicles before joining the AI lab at KTH. She saw firsthand how perception systems built for controlled environments collapse in nature.

"We have taught machines to be brilliant, but only inside the environments we engineered for them," she told TechCrunch. "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."

Her conclusion shaped the product's design. "I was convinced the answer was not a louder deterrent," she said. Flox's devices instead change their deterrent responses based on what a nearby animal is doing — and which species it is — and vary responses over time so animals do not become habituated to repeated signals. Nozkova did not publish independent data on habituation rates, so that claim rests on the company's own field results.

How the system works

The hardware follows a simple sequence:

• A motion sensor wakes the device when it detects movement.
• A camera captures the scene, and on-device models identify the animal.
• The device emits a species-appropriate sound to scare it away.

The company also sells a software platform that shows clients where devices are deployed and what is happening on the ground, generates reports for regulatory compliance, and supports uses such as biodiversity monitoring. The longer-term goal is to make the software portable enough to run 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 sites including:

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

Who pays, and how much

Flox sells edge units upfront, then charges an annual software and AI subscription after the first year. It also has OEM partnerships under which companies pay an annual fee to deploy its software on vehicles such as trains; train manufacturer Alstom is one such partner. Nozkova said the company expects to end 2026 with revenue of about $1.5 million.

That is a modest figure against a $10 million raise, and the company will need to demonstrate that deployments can scale from 150 devices to several thousand without field performance degrading.

What about 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 sells a system that detects birds with computer vision and targets them with a moving laser, adjusting its response as needed.

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

Her broader thesis reaches past wildlife deterrence. "Physical AI is walking out of the factory and into the messy, alive outdoors," she 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."

Funding and what comes next

The company has raised about $5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds. The seed round was led by Unconventional Ventures and Tilia Impact Ventures, with co-investors including GENIUS NY, Norrsken, Satgana and angel investors.

The $10 million Series A now opening would mostly fund growth from about 150 deployed devices to several thousand units and extend the underlying system beyond its current wildlife use cases. Whether "nature intelligence" becomes a real layer of the perception stack — or stays a niche deterrent business — depends on what Flox can prove as its device count scales.

By James Calloway