We were just talking about Path's design last night.

Today we discovered that Path raised 40 on 250 from Redpoint.

Investors valued Path's 2-3mm registered users at $100-150 per user, a number that rivals Facebook.

Wow. Congrats Path!

The pundits:

• Rafe Needleman, Path, Instagram, and the Greater Fool Theory says "Nearly every startup CEO I talk to who's working on a mobile app that looks halfway decent tells me that Path served as a design inspiration."

• Nicholas Carson, Redpoint Might Have Bought Itself a $40 million Headache says "RedPoint just invested in a startup that is in many ways very similar to Path: Caterina Fake's new startup Pinwheel."

• Om Malik, Path is no Instagram, says "Path still needs to define a singular addictive behavior and that is its challenge (and opportunity)."

It will be interesting to see where they go from here. What will be the Path taken?

Path and its mobile peers are doing very well right now: http://pandawhale.com/convo/1106/instagram-and-path-and-branchout-and-evernote-and-square-oh-my

Om Malik says he believes the politics of venture capital had a role to play in this funding:

Redpoint, like neighbor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is increasingly getting pressured by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners. And while Redpoint is pretty good at infrastructure and IT investments, the firm has a mixed record when it comes to new post-social services. Dharmaraj has made a number of investments in the social and mobile space, including Peel, Chill, Pulse, Gogobot and Posterous, which was recently acquired by Twitter. Redpoint is betting Path changes all that.

Om didn't mention that Kleiner Perkins (Chi-Hua Chien) is an investor in Path, nor that many investors participated in this round, including Greylock (David Sze), Index Ventures (Mike Volpi), Jerry Murdock, Sir Richard Branson, Mark Pincus, Yuri Milner, and Allen & Company.

Satish Dharmaraj of Redpoint calls Path "a private mobile social network" and Path says it will spend the money on "user adoption".

Om also forgot to mention Redpoint's recent $7.5 million investment in Pinwheel.

Redpoint believes that social is the platform, and they're putting their money where their mouth is.

I, for one, am enthused about the future of the social Web.

Twitter acquired Posterous!  did not know.  Have we seen any integration of techniques or was it more of a talent acq?  I remember the ol Tumblr vs Posterous debate.I also remember when Path.io was supposed to be a collection of lists... Which means they weren't exactly wrong then either.

Not only did Twitter not integrate the Posterous product and techniques, but they're going to shut it down.

In April all of Posterous will go away.