Cloud communications company Twilio Inc. has raised $130 million Series E in a round led by Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, that included Altimeter Capital Management, Arrowpoint Partners, Amazon.com, and Salesforce Ventures.

News of the round first surfaced based on filings back in May at a figure of $100 million, but as it turns out apparently reports of the round saw both Amazon and Salesforce wanting a slice of the action, hence the appearance of the additional $30 million in the official confirmation.

Founded in 2007 Twilio offers a cloud-based API that that allows third-party developers to deploy voice, VoIP and SMS apps via simple code within their own applications.

The list of companies using the API is impressive and includes Uber Inc., AirBnB Inc., OpenTable Inc., Box Inc., Home Depot Inc., eHarmony Inc., The Coca-Cola Company, and many more.

We’ve covered Twilio extensively at SiliconANGLE as it’s a busy company; Twilio launched an Elastic SIP trunking service to general availability in March, a cloud-based solution that provides connectivity for IP-based communications infrastructure to connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN); In February it acquired two-factor authentication startup Authy Inc., a company that provides a simple API for developers to customize the user experience when they add two-factor authentication (2FA;) and in late May it launched eight new products covering a variety of services and features.

IPO off the table?

The Series E round remains somewhat of a mystery given consideration that a Twilio investor was publicly discussing an initial public offering back in February.

“The company will prepare itself this year for an initial public offering by putting internal processes in place, but no IPO date has been set,” Redpoint Ventures Scott Raney said at the time. “There’s no rush to go public, this is a company that’s easy to finance.”

While certainly doing an IPO can be a revenue raising exercise, it’s alternatively, and quite often more commonly an exit strategy for investors.

Twilio is eight years old, and investors normally (well, in non-bubble markets anyway) would be looking for an exit somewhere after year five to seven; the short version is that for the early Twilio investors, the company will be starting to get long in the tooth as an investment.

Including the new round, Twilio has raised $233.7 million to-date. Previous investors include Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Bessemer Venture Partners, K9 Ventures, 500 Startups, Union Square Ventures, SV Angel, and others.

The company said it would use the new round to accelerate its global expansion plans and expands its efforts to get into enterprise.

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