Yub, an online-to-offline marketer, received $12 million in funding yesterday from the likes of Visa and T. Rowe Price. Greylock Partners, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm, led the round. This investment is a vote of confidence for mobile-driven offers in retail, as well as corporate venturing in fintech.

To use Yub (the name is “buy” spelled backward), a consumer loads offers onto his debit or credit card from his smartphone. He then uses that card at the store where the offer originated. The offer or rewards do not need to be mentioned a the time of the sale. The reward is immediately sent to the user via email. That’s it.

The online-to-offline model uses affiliate marketing, pioneered online, to drive in-store sales. Plink is a competing player in this space and has established partnerships with several quick-service restaurants and retailers such as Staples and K-Mart. Shopkick is another.

Yub’s value proposition to merchants — which, in light of several high-profile disasters from Groupon, is the tricky part these days — is fivefold:

• Increase in-store sales
• Acquire new customers
• Pay only when a sale is made
• Profit more on each transaction
• Create loyal, motivated customers

The company also provides retailers with the data to track customer from online behavior through offline sales. Yub spun off from Trialpay, another startup by CEO Alex Rampell. Yub currently has 20 employees in its Mountain View, Calif. office.

Visa was an investor in Trialpay, and has also put money into Square, Securekey Technologies, and Ecrio. T. Rowe Price is an active corporate investor in startups.

An investment by Visa in a mobile commerce startup is sure to turn some heads. Look for money to continue to flow from financial services companies to the mobile offers space. Connecting the dots in the customer journey from decision to purchase will be a major battlefield in 2014.