A Wider Horizon

Sarah Dusek did not grow up imagining a career in tents. In a 2025 conversation with African Business Stories, she recalled family caravan holidays in Cornwall, often in the rain. She had grown up in Gloucestershire and did not consider herself particularly outdoorsy. Years later, outdoor hospitality would become the business that changed her life.

Her route there included studying law and working for nonprofit organizations. After an early business failed during the financial crisis, she and her husband moved to Montana with a young family and began again. The eventual idea was Under Canvas: safari-inspired places to stay near America’s national parks.

In that interview, she remembered a first Yellowstone season with thirty-five tents and roughly $50,000 left in the bank. The money still had to stretch through the off-season. The promising concept came with an immediate, practical problem: how to finance what happened next.

Those early calculations give context to her later move into venture capital. She had experienced the distance between seeing demand and having enough money to serve it. Investors now encounter someone who has stood on the other side of the fundraising conversation.

Dusek’s official biography puts the value of the Under Canvas business she built above $100 million. It also describes $10 million invested in women-led startups in southern Africa through the work associated with Enygma Ventures. The figures describe businesses and deployed capital, rather than her personal fortune.

At Enygma, where she is a cofounder and managing partner, the focus is women building businesses in Africa. Her public work also includes Thinking Bigger, a book intended to help women founders make their case for investment. Teaching the language of fundraising has become part of how she participates in it.

Her family’s geography changed alongside her work. Afar reported that Sarah and her husband, Jacob, moved from Montana to South Africa with their two sons in 2019. Their next hospitality venture, Few & Far, brought them back to developing travel experiences together.

In her 2024 Afar interview, Dusek traced their interest in South Africa’s Soutpansberg Mountains to Jacob’s search for a remote property. Meeting neighboring landowners drew the couple into a wider conservation ambition. A place sought for its wilderness became the starting point for another operating business.

By March 2025, Time was reporting on Few & Far Luvhondo as a new six-suite retreat that had soft-opened the previous December. Its offering included mountain walks, plunge pools and an aerial tram. Conservation and habitat-restoration goals accompanied the hospitality proposition.

The relationship between money and place runs through these chapters. A tented hotel needs guests; a young company needs capital; a conservation project needs an economic model that can support it. Dusek has chosen to work on all three.

Her official biography describes a life divided between the United States and South Africa. It is a fitting geography for a career that keeps returning to earlier experiences with new resources. The founder who once had to make a summer’s proceeds last through winter now helps other entrepreneurs think about the scale of what they might build.