Piston, a cardless payments platform that connects commercial fleets and petrol stations, has closed a $15m Series A funding round.
FPV Ventures led the investment, with existing backers Spark Capital and Pear VC also taking part. The fresh capital brings Piston’s total funding raised to date to $22.5m.
The round follows a strong twelve months for the business, in which payment volume grew eightfold year on year and its merchant network expanded 40 times over, while customer retention held at 98%. Piston’s technology is now live at more than 2,000 fuel stations across 48 US states, and its point-of-sale integrations are certified across systems covering over 95% of the country’s merchant fuel sites.
Fuel purchasing across the trucking industry, a sector worth more than $900bn, still relies heavily on physical card infrastructure, leaving fleets exposed to fraud, limited visibility over spending and lengthy reconciliation work. Piston’s platform gives fleet operators live visibility of fuel spend as it happens, without the need to issue or manage physical cards, while merchants gain direct access to commercial fuel demand, lower transaction costs and additional in-store sales driven by repeat fleet visits.
Piston was founded by Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah, who previously ran their own fleets and dealt first-hand with fuel-card fraud, hidden costs and administrative burden. Vikram’s fleet continues to act as the proving ground where new Piston features are tested before wider rollout.
Piston, headquartered in Cupertino, California, operates a fully cardless payments network linking commercial fleets with petrol stations and convenience stores. Its mobile authorisation technology is built directly into the point of sale, removing the risk of skimming fraud and cutting transaction costs for both merchants and fleet operators.
Fleet owners get real-time visibility of every gallon purchased, tied to a specific driver and vehicle, while merchants gain access to high-margin commercial fuel volume and increased in-store footfall.
Alongside the funding, Piston is rolling out two new AI-driven products. Piston Guard reviews every transaction for unusual activity and can flag or halt suspected fraudulent spending before it completes, while the Piston Analytics Agent helps fleet owners interpret their spending data and identify patterns without manual analysis.
The new capital will go towards accelerating the national build-out of Piston’s payments network, continuing product development and adding senior leadership across the business. Over the next 18 months, the company aims to establish coverage across every US region, laying the groundwork for an eventual expansion beyond fuel into broader logistics payments infrastructure.
Piston co-founder and CEO Vikram Sekhon said, “Commercial fuel still runs on payment technology built for another era. 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. This round lets us expand that infrastructure until no commercial driver has to ask whether a station accepts Piston.”
FPV Ventures Partner Nikunj Kothari said, “Fuel is one of the largest B2B spend categories in America, and every transaction still runs through decades-old card infrastructure. Piston moves that money over its own rails, with no card networks or intermediaries in between. Vikram ran hundreds of trucks and felt this pain every day, and Shivam recruited thousands of drivers before they wrote a line of code. This is a new payment network in a massive market, built by the people who actually lived the problem.”
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