EIT Digital Master School students protect agricultural fields from wild boars with innovative drones

In this time, two things came together. Tadiello (CPO) and Moletta (CTO) were working on a drones project and also spotted an offer of KTH Innovation that provides support to new ideas. They liked working with drones and started to think about building a startup together. The only problem was that they had not yet found a problem to solve with drones. “That is opposite to what we have learned at the EIT Digital Master School. The school taught us to start from the problem. Instead, we were looking at different problems that could be solved with drones,” laughs Tadiello.

After several iterations together and with coaches, a random sentence about wild boars in Sweden triggered the minds. “We knew about this problem occurring in Italy. That triggered our notion.”  Moletta continues: “From that point we found information about the problem. We called farmers and heard that some were even quitting their profession because of these wild animals. The topic really captured our attention realising the scale of the problem and we started to identify the best approach to solve it.”

In the summer of 2020, the young entrepreneurs slowly started to work on the technological side of their solution. The main part however they were occupied with finalising their master thesis.  In the second year of the EIT Digital Master School, students require to do an internship and write a thesis. They both went to work at the Swedisch company Inkonova that is building drones to 3D map underground mines. Even though it was not about their wild boar problem, the technical autonomous systems part was useful for their own project. 

Their knowledge on autonomous systems they acquired at school and their insights during their internship enabled them to run several tests on the technological part and developing a prototype. After the summer, they used another 15.000 euro of the grant for developing a prototype that they tested in the North part of Stockholm in November 2020. The co-founders used the last raised funding money for product development and market validation with a focus on Sweden and the rest of Europe. 

They officially launched their startup called Flox in December 2020, Tadiello as CPO and Moletta as CTO. The founders included a third person, Sára Nožková, as CEO in their team to exploit the Swedish market. Tadiello and Moletta say that they have good prospects. Moletta, who also doing a PhD research on Robotics and Artifical Intelligence: “we have active interest from different farmers in Sweden. We work already together with some of our customers. “ Tadiello adds that the cofounders are at a stage where they are looking for strategic partnerships. We already started to generate revenue. We are also preparing for opening the first seed round.”

The goal is to conquer the world. Tadiello: “The aim is to start in Sweden, expand next year to the southern part of Europe.  We plan to become one of the main players in the world to solve the problem of wild animals in agriculture. We use technology as a tool to create a more efficient and sustainable agriculture and allow farmers to focus on growth.”