Online-to-offline payments company Marqeta is seeing a bright future, and it’s made of plastic.

The Emeryville, Calif.-based startup recently closed a $3 million round of funding, bringing its total funding to $25 million, and entered a partnership with The Bancorp to bring Marqeta’s +M technology to the white-label bank’s prepaid product line. +M allows for the information from multiple cards to be stored on one physical card.

Marqeta is on a roll. It won the business for Facebook‘s gift card program in May 2013 and, as you might expect, that had a transformative effect on the company.

Facebook’s gifting process works like this: From within Facebook, a user can send a friend a $10 gift from Jamba Juice, for example. The friend gets an email and mobile alerts, if they want them, but the payment mechanism is a Facebook-branded card that arrives in the mail about a week later. The card is, of course, Marqeta’s.

“We’ve been focused on plastic forever,” said Jason Gardner, Marqeta’s founder and CEO. “Cards can be status symbols. We seem to forget the status issue and the branding opportunities, which are much better for cards than for mobile. Brand is important to cards. And people like physical things.”

Marqeta launched in 2010, inspired by the Starbucks loyalty card. Starbucks is more famous in the payments world for its industry-leading mobile app, which is really a card embedded in a phone. “We wanted to bring what Starbucks had to every merchant,” Gardner said. Referring to how customers load money on their cards for the sake of speed and convenience at the point-of-sale, he said, “35% of their revenue is captured before anyone walks in the door. Other companies say, ‘I want that, but we don’t own our payments infrastructure.’ I came to the realization that Starbucks was a technology company that sold coffee. Starbucks created a relationship with the customer through payments.”

Not controlling the payments infrastructure means merchants are reliant on the card networks, but customers are also comfortable with cards. Merchant-branded prepaid gift cards were in full bloom in 2010, but the problem, as Gardner saw it, was that their anonymity — bought off a shelf somewhere — prevented the building of a “Starbucks-like” relationship with the customer.

That was a problem Gardner set out to solve by providing a backend that would deliver data to merchants and give customers more control. “We built a technology where a single card can house 10 million cards,” Gardner said. This is the company’s +M multi-purse technology, used by The Bancorp.

“Every payment terminal has a unique identifier and can recognize an affiliated card, so we know who, where and how much is in the account to authorize the sale. We’re running on the Discover network now, but we’ll soon be on others, next year.”

Marqeta launched its API in 2010 and began talks with Facebook in 2012. “Merchants must be on Facebook,” Gardner said. “There are [more than] 180 million … consumers interacting here. There are 10 million US merchants, and they all take plastic. So moving online to offline, Facebook had this idea, ‘I don’t want to gift someone and send them 20 different cards. I want one Facebook-branded card.’”

And that, along with the digital management tool  for customers, called a ledger,  is what Marqeta delivered.  The Facebook deal helped Marqeta stand out in a competitive space. Gardner said, “We were 19 employees when we began speaking to them. Now we’re 48.” The company is adding an employee — Gardner calls them business partners — a week. Gardner wouldn’t talk numbers in terms of the business the Facebook partnership has brought in, but said, “It’s obviously very significant for us.” Uh, yeah.