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

Flox Intelligence is a Swedish startup building an AI system to keep wildlife away from roads, train tracks, airports and other infrastructure. It spun out of the AI lab at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2020 and is a finalist in this year's Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt.

The idea came from Sara Nozkova, who developed the system after reading about the damage that collisions between wildlife and infrastructure cause to both. The article's narrator recalls a train to Mumbai grinding to a halt with a great noise when they were eight, and says they long assumed such incidents happened only in places like rural India. A few years ago they learned that wildlife and infrastructure clash everywhere in the world.

Nozkova's approach is meant to differ from the traditional methods of sirens, lights, fences, falcons and culling. At KTH she worked on a system that can change its deterrent response depending on what a nearby animal is doing, and even on which species it is. In other words, the response is adaptive rather than a fixed signal.

The article gives only this background and does not describe how the system works in detail, where it has been deployed, or how well it performs. Its significance lies in the problem it targets: conventional deterrents are blunt, and animals and infrastructure both suffer when they fail. Flox's selection as a Startup Battlefield 200 finalist shows the work has moved from a university lab to a company seeking wider attention.