Tilia Impact Ventures Backs Flox Intelligence Turning AI Into a Language for Nature

• Tilia Impact Ventures led Flox Intelligence’s USD 3M Seed+ round
• The startup’s AI-powered bioacoustic system reduces human-wildlife conflicts across critical infrastructure
• The Flox Edge solution integrates sensing, analysis, and response directly on-device in real time
• Flox Intelligence see its role as an intelligent infrastructure enabler for large-scale human-wildlife coexistence globally

This February, Flox Intelligence—the NY-based developer of bioacoustic AI systems that reduce human-wildlife conflicts in infrastructure—raised its USD 3M Seed+ round of investment. The lead investor of the round is the well-known Czech VC firm Tilia Impact Ventures (invested in Delta Green, among others), joined by Satgana and GENIUS NY, alongside Flox Intelligence’s previous backers Unconventional Ventures and Almi Invest (invested in FirstQFM, among others).

From Research Lab to Real-World Problem Solving: AI Meets Living Ecosystems

Flox Intelligence was founded as a spin-off from the AI research lab at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where the co-founders Sára Nožková and Tomas Becklin were working at the intersection of AI, edge computing, and real-world sensing. They observed how large-area sensing and response got stuck between two bad options: high-capability systems that were too expensive to deploy broadly, and low-cost sensors that couldn’t act in real time.

Tilia Impact Venture believes protecting the environment requires going beyond CO2 reduction and prioritizes biodiversity and human-wildlife coexistence. ‘Sara and Tomas possess the qualities of strong founders: unbound ambition and determination, paired with rapid execution and fast learning cycles. Moreover, their mix of business acumen, technical expertise and passion for biodiversity is unique. As AI moves into the physical world, Flox Intelligence is perfectly positioned to become the foundational layer for wildlife intelligence,’ Tilia Impact Ventures’ co-founder and general partner Petr Vitek states.

‘Flox Intelligence is building something genuinely rare: AI that is grounded in the physical world, turning bioacoustic signals from living ecosystems into real-time intelligence about biodiversity. The team combines serious research credentials at the frontier of ecology and machine learning with strong commercial traction, already deployed across use cases from airports to agriculture to train infrastructure. Biodiversity loss is one of the defining crises of our time yet receives a fraction of the investment climate mitigation does, and Flox is creating the conditions for genuine human-wildlife coexistence with a truly bankable business model behind it at scale,’ Satgana’s founder and CEO Romain Diaz adds.

The team believed edge AI had finally matured enough to collapse that tradeoff — and that solving it first for wildlife (one of the hardest real-world detection problems) would build a platform that generalized to perimeter and сritical-infrastructure protection. They set out on a mission to reduce human-wildlife conflict by using AI and behavioral science to enable safer coexistence between animals and critical infrastructure such as airports, railways, farms, and industrial sites.

‘Flox’ is a nod to how our system thinks about the world — in flocks, flows, and movement patterns across a landscape rather than discrete point detections. It also reflects our roots in wildlife intelligence, where understanding animal movement at scale was the original problem we set out to solve,’ Ms Nožková tells ITKeyMedia.

From Overlooked Problem to Scalable Impact

After several years of field trials with wildlife biologists and infrastructure partners, Flox launched its flagship product, Flox Edge, in 2025. This is a battery-powered AI-enabled device that detects wildlife in real time, interprets species and behavior, and uses adaptive bioacoustics to guide animals away from danger zones without harm or habituation.

The system operates as part of a broader ‘wildlife intelligence platform,’ combining distributed Edge devices with a cloud-based control system that provides analytics, reporting, and remote management. It is already deployed across airports, rail networks, and agricultural environments in Europe and North America, including Alstom, Boliden Minerals, GRR Gerald R. Ford International Airport, KWS Group, the US Department of Agriculture, and the WWF. There, it helps prevent collisions and reduce operational disruption while preserving ecosystems and turning wildlife behavior into real-time, actionable intelligence for safer human environments.

‘Human-wildlife conflict has been hugely overlooked, and Flox Intelligence is turning the solution to this problem into a scalable business model with tangible impact. They prove that deep tech can meaningfully change the way industries interact with our natural ecosystems, while deploying at scale and delivering lasting outcomes,’ Unconventional Ventures’ general partner Alexis Horowitz-Burdick firmly believes.

Proving Impact in the Field

According to Ms Nožková, the hardest challenges along the way have been the usual hardware-meets-real world: ruggedizing for extreme environments. Aside from that, the team had to educate the market that ‘sensing’ and ‘response’ are one product, not two.

‘Most customers have historically bought cameras from one vendor, analytics from another, and response tooling from a third — then tried to stitch them together. We do all three on-device, in real time, without human-in-the-loop. Getting people to evaluate us on outcomes, such as incidents prevented or response time, rather than component specs like megapixels or FPS took time,’ the CEO explains.

To measure its progress, Flox Intelligence tracks a broad set of operational metrics, including incident prevention (e.g., bird strikes avoided at airports, livestock losses prevented, near-misses on runways), and uptime in the field. For airport customers, for example, deployments are tied to measurable reductions in wildlife strike risk and runway closures.

‘Influencing animal behavior at scale, we take the ethical boundary between ‘guiding’ and ‘controlling’ wildlife very seriously. Our approach is non-lethal and minimally invasive — we use species-appropriate deterrence. The goal is coexistence: keeping wildlife out of the very narrow spaces where they’d come to harm, including runways, substations, roads, without disrupting natural behavior elsewhere,’ Ms Nožková clarifies.

What the Funding Unlocks

According to GENIUS NY’s director Kara Jones, Flox Intelligence represents exactly the kind of world-changing technology GENIUS NY was designed to attract — turning AI and adaptable intelligence into a language for coexistence and proving that innovation can practically work in harmony with nature. 

This recent funding is meant to help Flox Intelligence expand its AI-powered wildlife intelligence platform across North America. More specifically, the team will focus on growing commercial and solutions-engineering teams in the US and Canada and advancing its platform (data, analytics, and multi-site intelligence). As such, the company will track its progress by the number of operational North American deployments (airports, conservation, infrastructure), total protected area under coverage, measurable reductions in wildlife-related incidents at deployed sites, and platform-level metrics like data volume and model performance improvements.

‘We envision a truly optimized human-wildlife coexistence system in the future, where critical infrastructure, communities, and wildlife share landscapes safely — because the infrastructure itself is aware. This includes airports that don’t have to close runways, power lines and substations that don’t become wildlife mortality hotspots, highways that can warn drivers in real time, farms and conservation areas that protect both livestock and predators. In the long run, we anticipate Flox Intelligence to become the sensing and response fabric that makes that kind of coexistence operationally and economically viable at scale,’ Ms Nožková concludes.

Addressing one of the most overlooked challenges at the intersection of infrastructure and ecology, Flox Intelligence is using AI to make human-wildlife coexistence manageable and deployable at scale. The involvement of Tilia Impact Ventures highlights a growing CEE footprint in backing globally relevant deeptech, particularly in biodiversity and climate-adjacent innovation. By leading this round, the Prague-based VC signals that CEE investors are not just participating in but actively shaping the future of nature-positive infrastructure technologies.