"When Tomas and I started, we had the audacious dream to pitch on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt. This year, with the traction we got, we finally felt ready to apply. Pinch me, please."
Sára NožkováCEO Flox Intelligence
What the Techcrunch Startup Battlefield 200 is
Startup Battlefield 200 is TechCrunch’s own founder competition and it has been running for close to two decades. Every year they pick 200 early-stage companies from thousands of applicants, put them on the Disrupt exhibition floor, and let the judges narrow that group down to 20 finalists who pitch live on the main stage. The winner walks away with $100,000, no equity taken, plus the Disrupt Cup.
The alumni list is impressive. Dropbox pitched at Startup Battlefield before most people had heard of it. Cloudflare stood on that stage too, and so did Discord. Companies that came through the competition have raised more than $32 billion between them and produced around 250 exits.
Around 10,000 people come to Disrupt: investors hunting for their next position, corporate buyers, journalists, and a lot of founders. For a company our size, that room is normally 3 years of travel budget compressed into 3 days.
A win for everyone working in nature
Getting in is good for Flox. It is also useful for a lot of people who will never hear our name.
Human-wildlife conflict is one of the biggest problems almost nobody outside the field talks about. Animals get killed on runways, rail lines and roads. People get hurt. Farmers lose income. Airports lose millions to bird strikes and to the deer standing where a plane needs to land. And the standard answer for decades has been to build a fence, or to shoot.
For 3 days in October, that problem gets described to thousands of influential people who currently have no idea it exists. That is worth more to us than any prize.
Nature tech got picked out of the same pile as the AI tooling companies and the fintech companies, and judged on the same terms. If you are building a nature venture and you keep getting told the category is too small or too soft, keep pushing. The appetite is real.
What we will be pitching with Flox Intelligence
Short version, in case you are new here.
Wildlife cannot read a warning sign. So we talk to animals in a language they already understand.
Flox combines edge AI, bioacoustics (the study of the sounds animals make and respond to) and behavioral science to detect an animal in real time and move it away from danger before anything goes wrong. Our device, Flox Edge, runs on its own in remote places with no reliable connection. It reacts in under 2 seconds and handles roughly 1,800 events per charge, 24 hours a day.
Where it runs today:
- Airports, on coyotes, deer and bird strikes
- Railways, on moose and bear incidents
- Roads and highways, on deer and bison collisions
- Farms and ranches, protecting livestock
- Energy sites, conservation areas and public land
Where we are, as of today: more than 60,000 wildlife events logged across 27 species, and over 60 operators using the technology. Our partners include the U.S. Department of Agriculture, WWF, Parks Canada, Gerald R. Ford International Airport, Alstom and Boliden. We closed a 4 million EUR round in February 2026, led by Tilia Impact Ventures, with Satgana, GENIUS NY, J.O.S.S., Unconventional Ventures and Almi Invest joining.
Flox started in 2020 as a spinoff from an AI research lab at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
What we are looking for at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
We are raising a Series A in early 2027, and Disrupt is where that conversation starts.
The money goes into things we can already put a price on. Flox Edge moves into volume production. We build out the sales side into airports, rail operators, road authorities and large landowners. And we turn those 60,000 logged wildlife events into a data product that tells an operator what is moving on their land, where, and at what time of night.
If you invest in infrastructure, industrial hardware, applied AI or nature tech, we would like to talk. Sara will be in San Francisco for the full event and has time set aside for investor meetings around the pitch.
Coming to San Francisco in October?
Let’s meet in person.
Email Sara directly at [email protected] to set something up. Coffee, or 20 minutes in a hotel lobby, whatever fits your week. Tell her who you are and what you want to talk about, and she will find a slot.
This goes for investors, airport and rail operators, wildlife researchers, journalists, and anyone who has been quietly interested in what we do and never had a reason to say hello. October 13 to 15, Moscone West.
Thank you to TechCrunch for the slot. Thank you to our investors, clients and supporters who backed a wild idea when it was still just an idea.
See you in San Francisco.
