Flox Intelligence Builds AI to Keep Wildlife Away From Trains, Airports and Roads

Wildlife collisions cost infrastructure operators millions of dollars every year, and Flox Intelligence believes the answer is smarter deterrents rather than louder ones. The Stockholm-based startup has developed an edge AI system that identifies animals near railways, airfields and roads and responds with species-appropriate sounds to scare them away.

The scale of the problem

The FAA estimates that wildlife strikes have cost U.S. civil aviation about $272 million a year on average between 1990 and 2025. On the rails, French 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, 120 trains hit animals in 2023, disrupting 660 services and causing more than 15,000 minutes of delays.

Flox CEO Sara Nozkova recalled a childhood train journey in India that was halted for eight hours after the train hit a wild bison at full speed. She later spent 13 years working in transportation and autonomous vehicles before joining the AI lab at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Traditional tools such as sirens, lights, fences, falcons and culling were not the answer. "I was convinced the answer was not a louder deterrent," she said.

How the system works

Flox makes battery-powered 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 unit then emits a species-appropriate sound to scare them away. The system learns from experience and varies its responses so animals do not get habituated to repeated signals.

The devices can be mounted on poles, trees and other structures. Flox also sells a software platform that shows clients where units are deployed and generates reports for regulatory compliance and uses such as 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.

Deployment, partners and funding

About 150 Flox devices are live across 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 the edge units upfront and charges an annual software and AI subscription after the first year. It also has OEM partnerships, including train manufacturer Alstom, with partners paying an annual fee to deploy its software on vehicles. Flox expects to end 2026 with revenue of about $1.5 million.

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 to grow from about 150 devices to several thousand units and to extend the system beyond its current wildlife use cases.

Sources: Techcrunch Ai