The Story
Piston has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by FPV Ventures, with existing investors Spark Capital and Pear VC participating. It takes total funding to $22.5 million, after a $1.2 million pre-seed led by Pear VC in October 2024 and a $6.1 million seed led by Spark Capital in April 2025.
The company runs a cardless payments network connecting commercial fleets with gas stations and convenience stores in the United States. Drivers pay through an app-generated QR code that ties each transaction to a specific driver, vehicle, time, location and fuel type, with authorisation built directly into the station's point-of-sale system rather than requiring additional hardware. There is no physical card, so there is nothing for a skimmer to copy, and fleet owners see each gallon as it is bought rather than reconciling statements afterwards.
The part that changes the economics is less visible. Piston moves money over its own rails rather than through the card networks, which removes interchange for the merchant and the retail price markups that fleet cards typically carry for the fleet.
Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah founded the company in June 2024, both having operated fleets themselves. Sekhon has described running 120 to 250 trucks dispatched daily, with fuel his second-largest expense after payroll and the hardest to control. His own fleet remains the first environment in which Piston tests new features.
Its entire engineering function sits in Kolkata, where an office that opened in April 2023 with five people has grown to a 25-member team building the technology behind the US network.
The company says payment volume grew eightfold year on year, its merchant network expanded fortyfold and customer retention stands at 98 percent. It is live at more than 2,000 stations across 48 states, and its point-of-sale integrations are certified across systems covering more than 95 percent of US merchant fuel sites.
The money funds national network expansion, product development and senior hires over the next 18 months, with the stated aim of coverage across every US region and an eventual move beyond fuel into broader logistics payments. Two AI products are planned: Guard, which evaluates transactions for anomalies and can block suspected fraud before completion, and an Analytics Agent for fleet owners to interrogate spending patterns.
Why It Matters
Sekhon's framing of the problem is the most useful sentence in the announcement: fleet fuel fraud is a physical card problem disguised as a detection issue.
That distinction is worth unpacking, because it explains why an entire industry has spent decades solving the wrong thing. A fleet card is a piece of plastic that a driver carries and a pump reads. It can be skimmed at the dispenser, which is one of the most common payment fraud vectors in the United States. It can be shared, lent, or used to fill a personal vehicle. It can be used at a station charging whatever it likes. The incumbents responded by building ever more sophisticated detection: spending limits, velocity checks, alerts, exception reports. All of that is downstream of a transaction that has already happened, and all of it is trying to infer from data what the card itself cannot tell you, which is who is standing at the pump and what they are filling.
Removing the card removes the question. An authorisation generated on a driver's phone, tied to a specific vehicle and fuel type and validated inside the point-of-sale system, does not need to be detected after the fact because it could not have been misused in the first place.
The second decision is the one that makes it a business rather than a feature. Piston does not issue a better card on top of the existing networks; it moves the money itself. Commercial fuel is one of the largest business-to-business spend categories in America and nearly all of it still routes through card infrastructure designed for a different era, carrying costs at every hop. A network that owns its own rails can price for both sides: cheaper acceptance for the station, no retail markup for the fleet.
The certification work is what makes any of it possible, and it is buried at the bottom of every version of this announcement. Fuel dispenser point-of-sale systems are notoriously closed, slow to certify against and expensive to integrate with, which is precisely why the fleet card business has had the same names in it for thirty years. Piston is certified and live across systems covering more than 95 percent of US merchant fuel sites, roughly two years after being founded. Everything else in the pitch depends on that having been done first.
And the founders knew the problem from the inside. Sekhon dispatched hundreds of trucks a day and tried every product on the market before deciding none of them worked. Shah recruited thousands of drivers. That is not a market they researched.
The Strategic Read
The growth multiples need reading against the base they came from.
Fortyfold merchant growth sounds extraordinary until you note the company was founded in June 2024, which puts the starting point somewhere around fifty stations. Eightfold payment volume growth is measured over a period when Piston was barely a year into operating. Both figures are real and both describe a company moving quickly from close to nothing. The absolute number is the more useful one: 2,000 stations against roughly 145,000 fuel retail sites in the United States is a little over one percent of the market. Coverage across every US region within 18 months, which is the stated goal, is a considerably harder thing than fortyfold growth from fifty.
The 98 percent retention figure is the more interesting claim, and it is the one that fits the product. Fuel payment is not a discretionary purchase. A fleet that has integrated its authorisation, driver assignment and reconciliation into one system does not casually switch back to cards, particularly if the switch costs it visibility it now relies on. High retention in payments infrastructure is usually structural rather than a sign of delight.
The competitive question is what the incumbents do. Commercial fuel cards in the United States are dominated by a small number of large providers, and the segment has long been criticised for opaque fee structures, with US regulators having brought action against one of the largest over its charges. That is the vulnerability Piston is attacking, and customers who feel overcharged are the easiest to take. But those incumbents have decades of merchant relationships, balance sheets that can absorb price competition, and the ability to match a cardless product if it starts to matter. What they cannot easily replicate is the decision to abandon their own interchange revenue, which is where a challenger with no legacy economics has the advantage.
The Kolkata team is the part of this story that deserves more attention than it will get. Twenty-five engineers in West Bengal are building and running the payments infrastructure for a network handling commercial fuel transactions across 48 American states. That is not an offshore support function or a cost-arbitrage back office; it is the whole technical organisation, and the commercial operation in the United States is the part that sits downstream of it. For an Indian ecosystem that mostly exports engineers rather than engineering, a company whose entire product is built here and sold there is a different shape of story.
What is not disclosed is the money. No revenue, no take rate, no transaction volume in dollars, no unit economics per station. A payments network's health is measured in volume and spread, and Piston has published growth multiples instead of either. At $22.5 million raised in 15 months, that is a reasonable position for the company to hold. It is also the thing that will have to change before the next round.
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