Flox Intelligence is building AI to keep wildlife away from trains, airports, and roads

Flox 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. A motion sensor wakes the device when it detects movement, triggering a camera that uses on-device models to identify nearby animals. The device then emits a species-appropriate sound to scare them away.

Nozkova says the system learns from experience, too, and varies its responses so animals don’t get habituated to repeated signals.

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 the devices are deployed and what’s happening on the ground. The platform can also generate reports for regulatory compliance and for uses like 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.

Nozkova says about 150 Flox devices are live in 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; mining sites; and critical infrastructure such as electrical substations.

The company sells edge units upfront, then charges an annual software and AI subscription after the first year. Flox 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.

Unique as Flox’s product and approach is, the startup is not without competition. Robin Radar’s Scarecrow also uses species-specific distress calls to disperse birds and it records the activity, while iCHASE sells a system that detects birds with computer vision and targets them with a moving laser, adjusting its response as needed.

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.”

The company 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, Nozkova said.

The company 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.