Startup Stage: Safari Circle takes a matchmaking approach to safari planning

Safari Circle

Safari Circle is an early-stage travel startup focused on simplifying the process of planning and booking a safari. Rather than beginning with available inventory, the company starts by understanding how travelers want to experience a trip, including their priorities and tradeoffs.

The bootstrapped business launched in May 2026 with a B2C, commission-based model and is exploring B2B channel partnerships to expand distribution. 

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Safari Circle is an early-stage, AI-native startup that matches aspiring safari-goers with the experience that best fits them. Rather than starting with inventory, our Safari DNA approach first understands the traveler, how they’d like to feel on their trip, their preferences and tradeoffs and uses that to identify destinations, parks and lodges they are more likely to fall in love with. 

In our recent market study of U.K. consumers who’d researched or planned a safari but did not book, 71% said the process was harder than planning a typical holiday, yet 96% would still consider going in the future. We see a significant gap between aspiration and confidently navigating the thousands of choices involved.

By understanding the traveler first, we make that complexity manageable, helping more people find the right safari for them, while broadening discovery beyond the same familiar destinations.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

We started with a direct-to-consumer travel advisory business model focused on the safari segment, leveraging a hybrid agentic operating model to scale effectively with a small team, while exploring B2B channel partnerships to boost distribution.

Our unique Safari DNA system creates behavioral traveler fingerprints that we use to match potential safari-goers to the best-fitting destinations, parks and lodges for who they are in the wild, across thousands of variables, parameters and signals. Think matchmaking, but for perfect safari itineraries. People already use AI to research safaris—59% of our research cohort reported use of AI—but 74% of those AI users still said the overall process was harder than planning a typical holiday. That distinction matters to us: Answering individual questions with AI isn't the same as helping someone confidently navigate the entire decision.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths: The founding team has about four decades of collective experience building innovative digital products with some of the world’s biggest companies and investors; we’re starting as an AI-native company from the ground up; our founder has a deep connection to both Kenya and safari.

Weaknesses: Being our first travel and, specifically, safari venture, we are still establishing operational history and relationship depth industrywide; bootstrapping means relying on organic customer acquisition rather than investor-funded growth acceleration.

Opportunities: Transactional booking approaches seen today don’t translate well for a complex, high-commitment, experiential activity like safari. A design-first, narrative-driven approach coupled with strategic channel partners could address this need at real scale.

Threats: Established players expanding into safari with a similarly fresh approach, backed by funding to scale share fast.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspectives?

Safari is a significant investment for travelers, but life-changing when done right. Researching, planning and booking the right safari is both time-consuming and complex, with dozens of variables—from parks to seasons, logistics to lodges, age suitability to health risks, remoteness to convenience and crowds to costs.

People often spend more than a week researching, only to abandon the dream due to the complexity at the booking stage. Those who do book may find the tradeoffs they made with limited information meant the experience wasn’t one they could fall in love with.

This isn't limited to inexperienced travelers struggling with online research: Three quarters of our respondents travel abroad at least twice a year, yet 71% still found planning a safari harder than a typical trip. Many routes to booking an African safari today are fundamentally transactional, often without the deep expertise to help customers understand and make the right tradeoffs—pushing more people to the same iconic parks and peak seasons, rather than the often-quieter places where a deeper bond with the wild is possible.

Now that the product is built, what's your strategy for customer acquisition?

Safari is a long sell—travelers often research over weeks or months and typically book nine to 12 months ahead. We factor this into our customer acquisition by helping potential safari-goers better understand what kind of experience they will fall in love with well before they’re ready to book.

We are currently focused on organic growth—personal networks, word of mouth and alliances within the niche—while exploring channel partnerships with larger travel-adjacent businesses and loyalty programs.

Safari is often a long-standing aspiration rather than an occasion-driven purchase: 59% of our research cohort said they’d “always wanted to go,” while 72% weren't planning around a particular occasion. Our strategy needs to engage people across a long consideration journey, not just when they're ready to book.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market. 

We've conducted ethnographic research across the safari journey—aspirants, researchers, bookers, repeat travelers—alongside surveys to size the latent need and mapped the industry landscape: advisors, DMCs, lodge owners and frictions across that value chain.

Before building anything, we rigorously prototyped and validated with users, often hearing “we wish something like this existed before we booked” from consumers and “this is a refreshing take” from industry operators.

How and when will you make money?

Like many travel advisors, we make money through commissions, so bookings keep the lights on. Having recently launched, we are building our pipeline and have secured our first bookings. Word of mouth is a huge factor in experiential travel, so momentum and scale will take time.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Our founder Siddika is a sixth-generation Kenyan who spent her formative years there, developing a deep love for safari, and still returns to the wild whenever possible from her daily life in the U.K.

The [founders] are startup veterans and serial venture builders, previously at BCG Digital Ventures and McKinsey Leap, turning ambitious ideas into distinctive digital businesses for some of the world's largest companies; most recently [they worked] together at International Airlines Group, home of BA and BA Holidays. The team also advises other startups on strategy, go-to-market, AI integration, product and UX.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

Though small, we’ve worked on diverse, high-impact teams throughout our careers, and diversity and inclusion is central to what we do. We actively seek local partners and suppliers to our safari destinations, and our founder was a venture scout for under-represented founders at Ada Ventures.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

For a small, bootstrapped team, the to-do list feels never-ending and growth slower than venture-fueled paths. With a clear focus on essentials and ruthless prioritization, we're moving toward positive economics while retaining full directional control.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact. Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

We entered the space with our eyes wide open, believing that addressing an underserved need in a well-insulated niche with an AI-native but deeply human and purpose-led approach would have a good chance at moving the needle.

Consumer AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are already disrupting traditional OTA funnels by connecting discovery directly to booking. This is as a great time to tackle the safari vertical with an approach that anticipates and adapts to the modern consumer tech landscape.

From our research, we know there is an opportunity for vertical AI products that understand safari's specific tradeoffs, rather than simply providing another general-purpose research interface.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

A healthy, growing book of bookings from travelers matched to their perfect itineraries, plus returning travelers spreading the word. On technology, we'll stay close to the front of the rapidly changing AI landscape. On the business side, we're aiming to secure our first major channel partners.

What is your endgame? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

We bootstrapped to control our destiny, and as seasoned venture builders, we stay open to all possibilities. Our purpose is to help people fall in love with safari, protect wild places and wildlife and uplift the communities that protect them. If we can achieve this at scale, then secure an appropriate exit that protects those values, it’s a win-win in our books.