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Search - Thursday, July 3, 2008

Travel Search's Kango Becomes UpTake, Raises $3.95M

We covered Palo Alto's Three All Inc. (aka Kango, now UTake) back last August. The startup plans to help families to plan kid-friendly trips. Users get data like the ratio of kids to care-givers. how many kids on average are in a group, activities, hours, etc.

We liked the idea in Alpha as it was geared to provide travel deals for families. If you have kids, you will get the value immediately. Sites like Expedia are not very helpful in guiding family friendly trips and if you have kids in toe, that's priority number one.

Now that the company has officially launched, we discover that they also have pet friendly vacation deals, romantic getaway deals, and girls getaways. These ideas also seem to make sense. The challenge as we see it will be distribution.

The company has been backed by NG Venture's Elliot Ng, who is VP of Marketing. He had been co-founder of Netcentives. Now UpTake has raised $3.95M in Series A, says PeHub, Shasta Ventures led the round.

UpTake seems to have had some troubles out the gate as it has had to change its name from Kango and even has to direct traffic to Kaango.com from a prominent home page placement. Not an auspicous start.

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