Path may have just sealed a new $20M funding deal

We’re hearing loud rumors this morning that hot-as-molten-lava startup Path may have just closed a $20 million round of funding.

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The round was reportedly led by Redpoint Ventures and pegged Path at a $250 million valuation.

While Business Insider is saying the funding is confirmed by anonymous sources close to the matter, we’re still waiting for official confirmation from our sources at Path.

UPDATE: Our Path source replies, “It’s just rumors and speculation.” So for now, the startup has nothing to confirm; still, we’re keeping our ears to the ground.

Path has been through the ringer in recent weeks due to a privacy fiasco — one that even had Apple CEO Tim Cook calling Path founder Dave Morin for copying personal data from people’s iPhones.

The app was caught grabbing contact information, including names, phone numbers, and email addresses, from users’ iPhone address books. The startup issued a formal apology in which Morin stated, “Through the feedback we’ve received from all of you, we now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.”

More to the point, we recently sat down with Morin for a one-on-one chat at South By Southwest. While the CEO didn’t have anything to say about the startup’s possible funding at that time, we did talk in detail about where Path will go in the near future, the philosophies that drive the application, and how Path’s friends-and-family-first approach to social networking has shaped our expectations for privacy and audience.

To date, Path has taken a total of $11.2 million in venture capital funding, including an $8.65 million Series A around this time last year.

Image courtesy of Robert Scoble

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