Welcome to our Ecosystem Highlight series, where you’ll meet the innovators in our vast ecosystem of startup builders from across Florida, who are actively solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Rodolfo Saccoman, Founder of WildlifeOS™, which builds AI infrastructure for wildlife risk, starting with CrocAlarm™, a sonar-first system designed to detect crocodilians in real time before they surface.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to join, launch, or help grow your company?

I’ve spent much of my career building technology companies at the intersection of AI and the physical world, including two prior AI exits. The idea for WildlifeOS came much closer to home.

I was biking through Babcock Ranch in Southwest Florida, surrounded by beautiful lakes and retention ponds, and kept thinking about how naturally people, pets and wildlife coexist at the water’s edge — yet there is virtually no technology monitoring what is happening beneath the surface. We have sophisticated systems for cybersecurity, fire detection and physical security, but wildlife risk is still largely managed with signs, sightings and phone calls.

That observation became CrocAlarm™, and ultimately the much larger vision for WildlifeOS™.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Wildlife risk is one of the largest remaining physical-world risks without an always-on intelligence layer. Today, an HOA, municipality, resort or golf course may know an alligator is nearby only after someone sees it. That is fundamentally reactive.

We’re starting with CrocAlarm™ — using AI and sonar to detect crocodilians in environments where cameras struggle — but what excites me most is the larger opportunity. WildlifeOS™ can turn wildlife risk into structured data: detection, classification, alerts, behavioral intelligence and ultimately a system of record.

If we succeed, we can build a meaningful technology company while helping people and wildlife coexist more safely. That combination is incredibly motivating.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in helping build or scale the company? How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge has been resisting the temptation to make the technology sound easier than it is.

Detecting an animal underwater, in murky Florida water, and distinguishing it from fish, turtles, vegetation or debris is a difficult technical problem. We decided very early to be dataset-first and sonar-first rather than force a camera-based solution where cameras simply do not work.

We’re addressing that by surrounding the problem with people who have solved hard technical problems before: my co-founder Dr. Noel Elman brings decades of experience in sensing and field-deployed systems, we engaged a dedicated hardware engineering partner, and we’re building the validation process step by step. We would rather prove something difficult than market something easy that doesn’t work.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Florida is our proving ground.

Our next phase is to build and deploy the first CrocAlarm systems, create a proprietary labeled sonar dataset, validate detection in real-world aquatic environments, and begin pilots with communities and institutional partners.

From there, the ambition is much larger than alligators. We believe WildlifeOS can become the intelligence infrastructure for wildlife risk across species and environments — crocodilians first, followed over time by other aquatic and terrestrial threats.

The end goal is not to build a single device. It is to build the system of record for wildlife risk.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with someone building or growing a company.

Separate what you know from what you believe.

Write down your biggest assumptions — about the customer, technology, pricing and distribution — and then design the fastest, cheapest way to prove or disprove each one.

Founders naturally fall in love with the vision. Keep the vision enormous, but be brutally honest about what has actually been validated. That discipline saves an incredible amount of time and capital.

Why Florida?

There may be no better place in the world to build this company.

Florida combines rapid population growth, enormous waterfront development, millions of residents living alongside wildlife, a massive tourism economy, thousands of HOAs and communities built around water, and one of the largest alligator populations in the United States.

It gives us customers, wildlife, regulatory infrastructure and real-world environments all in one place.

And personally, I love that WildlifeOS was born from observing a problem here in Florida and can be built into a global company from Florida.

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