Redpoint leads $30M funding for photo-app Path

This funding round brings Path's valuation to $250M, half of Instagram's before its $1B acquisiton

Path, a photo sharing social network, annouced Monday that it closed a $30 million round of funding led by RedPoint Ventures, valuing the startup at $250 million, according to multiple published reports. The official funding announcement showed that the Series B round included investments from Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Jerry Murdock , Sir Richard Branson, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures, Mark Pincus, Yuri Milner and Allen & Company.

Path created a mobile photo sharing app that has quickly garnered two million users off of the $11.2 million it has raised since the the end of 2010.

There has been a lot of buzz about Path as a possible next big get in the wild world of acquisitions, especially since Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of the mobile photo sharing app Instagram. But as a smaller company with less action happening on the platform daily, Path is not yet at an Instagram level.

Paty, according to AppData, has fewer than 500,000 daily active users to Instagram's more than 12 million and, currently, Instagram is adding nearly one million users per day. Path has been known as a company capable of gaining users at a fast clip -- its userbase jumped from 10,000 users to 300,000 users in two and half weeks early on in the app launch. But one of the main problems it is still dealing with is the aftermath of some privacy issues when the company recently found itself in trouble for uploading the contact list of its iPhone users without permission.

This latest round of funding for Path was fundraising was first reported back in March by Business Insider, but on Sunday it was confirmed that the amount the company has secured was $30 million, not $20 million.

Path’s last funding was $8.65 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and Digital Garage Japan at the beginning of 2011.

While Path has a lotos potential to grow as a major competitor with Facebook's newly purchased Instagram, it may take a little while to see just how long Instagram can keep up its usership growth and adoption before we know if Path has a fighting chance. 

I would imagine that if any companies are eyeing their own photo app to fold into their business, it would be Google or Twitter, but it seems unlikely that such a grab would happen so close to the Instagram snag -- I think most businesses want to see just how well accepted this change is first.