Sumit Vishwakarma11 Sep 2026
13:23IST
New Update
Piston, a cardless payments platform connecting commercial fleets with fuel stations, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by FPV Ventures.
Existing investors Spark Capital and Pear VC also participated, bringing the startup‘s total funding to $22.5 million.
Piston said it will use the new capital to expand its payments network across the US, develop its products and add senior leaders to the business.
The startup aims to establish coverage across every US region within 18 months and plans to expand beyond fuel into wider logistics payments infrastructure.
Founded by former fleet operators Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah, Piston has developed a payments network that replaces physical fuel cards with mobile authorisation technology.
Its system links a fuel purchase to a driver and vehicle rather than a physical card. Piston’s platform also checks information including driver identity, vehicle details, location and fleet policies before authorising fuel.
The startup said this gives fleet operators greater control and visibility over fuel spending while reducing their reliance on physical cards.
“Fleet fuel fraud is a physical card problem, disguised as a detection issue. We removed the card and built a network that authorizes every purchase for a specific driver and vehicle at the point of sale,” Sekhon, Piston’s co-founder and CEO, said.
Its payment volume had increased eightfold year-on-year, while its merchant network had expanded 40-fold over the past year. Customer retention stood at 98%, according to the startup.
The platform is now deployed at more than 2,000 stations across 48 US states. Its point-of-sale integrations cover more than 95% of US merchant fuel sites.
Fleet operators using the platform can monitor fuel spending in real time and link transactions to individual drivers and vehicles. According to Piston, fuel retailers can gain access to commercial fleet demand while benefiting from lower transaction costs.
It is also developing AI tools aimed at fraud detection and spending analysis.
Piston Guard reviews transactions using information about drivers, vehicles, locations and spending behaviour to identify unusual activity. Piston describes it as an AI agent that reviews transactions and flags anomalies for fleet operators.
Its Analytics Agent allows fleet operators to ask questions about transactions and spending in natural language, compare periods and identify trends across drivers, vehicles and stations.
Piston also operates an engineering office in Kolkata, which houses the team building technology for its US payments network.
Before the Series A, Piston had raised $7.5 million. This included a $6.1 million seed round led by Spark Capital and announced in June 2025, with participation from Pear VC and BOND, following a $1.4 million pre-seed investment through the PearX accelerator.
