Flox Intelligence opens $10M round for AI wildlife deterrents

Wildlife collisions are a bigger and costlier problem than most transportation operators like to admit. The FAA estimates 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 rank among its five leading causes of delays; in Brittany alone, animals struck 120 trains in 2023, disrupting 660 services and causing more than 15,000 minutes of delays.

That damage inspired Sara Nozkova to build a wildlife-deterrent system that works differently from the sirens, lights, fences, falcons, and culling traditionally used to keep animals off roads, train tracks, airports, and other infrastructure. “I was convinced the answer was not a louder deterrent,” she told TechCrunch. After 13 years working in transportation and autonomous vehicles, Nozkova had seen how quickly systems built for controlled environments — cities, factory lines, warehouses — fail once they’re deployed into unpredictable nature. She joined the AI lab at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology and built a system that changes its deterrent response based on what kind of animal is nearby and what it’s doing. That work became Flox Intelligence, which spun out of KTH in 2020 and is now one of the finalists at this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 competition at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

Flox makes battery-operated edge devices, mounted on poles, trees, and other structures, that process data on-site rather than in the cloud: a motion sensor wakes the device, a camera identifies the animal using on-device models, and the system emits a species-appropriate sound, varying its response over time so animals don’t become habituated. Flox also sells a software platform that tracks where devices are deployed and generates compliance and biodiversity reports. About 150 Flox devices are currently live across North America, Europe, and Australia, at airfields, road and rail corridors, national parks, farmland, mining sites, and critical infrastructure like electrical substations. Train manufacturer Alstom is among its OEM partners, paying an annual fee to deploy Flox’s software on vehicles.

Flox has raised about $5 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, led by Unconventional Ventures and Tilia Impact Ventures with GENIUS NY, Norrsken, Satgana, and angel investors also participating. It expects to end 2026 with revenue of about $1.5 million and is now opening a $10 million Series A, aimed mostly at growing from about 150 devices to several thousand deployed units and extending the system beyond wildlife use cases. “Physical AI is walking out of the factory and into the messy, alive outdoors,” Nozkova said.

Why it matters

If Flox can prove its edge-AI deterrents scale from a few hundred devices to several thousand, it offers transport operators and insurers a cheaper way to cut a cost that most infrastructure budgets don’t explicitly track today.