Clutch, a mobile commerce company that focuses on combining e-gifting, loyalty programs and merchant rewards on a single device, has raised $5.3 million in Series B financing, the company announced today.

The funding round was led by Safeguard Scientifics Inc., which provides growth capital and operational support to technology and healthcare companies, with contributions from previous investors, including Ben Franklin Technology Partners. The funds will be used primarily for further development of the Clutch mobile commerce platform, including its B2B offering, which the company will unveil later this year, the announcement said.

Clutch also announced that it has acquired ProfitPoint, a supplier of loyalty and gift programs, for an undisclosed price.

In reporting on the announcement, TechCrunch said that Clutch, unlike other mobile shopping apps that tend to focus on only one aspect of the shopping experience (mobile couponing, for example), has a vision that involves replacing multiple services with one app that does it all.

And Clutch is moving toward offering mid-size retailers their own applications — something like the Starbucks mobile app, for example, TechCrunch said, which is where the ProfitPoint acquisition comes in. That company brings more than 3,000 merchant clients and a merchant card processing platform.

Clutch recently acquired Sqoot, which aggregates local deals from more than 50 providers, including Groupon, Living Social and Yelp. With the Clutch mobile app, which is available from Google Play or the iTunes App Store, consumers can use their location and also search deals by keyword and category.

"We've developed an unmatched level of understanding about the unique intersection of mobile payments, loyalty and gifting over the past four years, including what it takes to deliver convenience and value to the consumer," Ned Moore, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Clutch, said in a news release. "I'm personally excited to be partnering with Safeguard again, who previously demonstrated at my last company the deep operational and domain expertise that will drive value for Clutch going forward. Our objective is to extend this value to the merchant community in the months ahead as we move from being a purely consumer-focused company to one that also serves the needs of merchants that want to deliver real value to shoppers through their own branded mobile applications, but don't have the time or resources to develop one in house."

Retailers with loyalty and gifting programs see 46 percent more purchases than retailers without such programs, Erik Rasmussen, Safeguard managing director, technology, who will also join Clutch's board of directors, said in the release. "As a result, it's essential for retailers to launch these programs across all of the customer touch points, especially mobile," he said. "Clutch addresses this need by being one of the only companies in the market that unifies offline, online and mobile loyalty into one platform that allows merchants to launch loyalty and gifting programs seamlessly to their customers."

Learn more about loyalty programs.