Piston, a payments startup that wants to improve how trucking and delivery companies pay for fuel, announced on Tuesday that it raised $6.1 million in seed funding. The round was led by Spark Capital, with support from Pear VC and BOND.
With this new round, Piston has now raised a total of $7.5 million, including $1.4 million from an earlier pre-seed round through the PearX accelerator.
The money will be used to hire more people for engineering, operations, and sales and to help the company grow its presence with fleet operators.
The startup was started by former fleet operators Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah. They created a fuel payment system that doesn’t use cards—commercial drivers can pay at gas stations by scanning QR codes from an app.
Every time a payment is made, the system records important details like the vehicle ID where the fuel was bought the type of fuel, and the time of purchase. This helps make things more straightforward and reduces fraud. The system is designed to replace traditional fleet cards which are often expensive and complicated to track.
“Fuel was our second-largest expense after payroll and the most chaotic to manage. We tried every solution on the market when we ran our fleets, and none of them worked. So, we decided to build one ourselves from scratch without the baggage of legacy card networks,” said Sekhon, Co-founder and CEO of Piston.
Piston is based in Cupertino, California, and also has a team working in Kolkata. The company started in April 2024 with only five employees, but now it has grown to more than 25 people.
Piston’s platform is also helpful for independent gas stations, many of which are franchises.
It lets these stations get business from commercial fleets without needing new machines or changes to their current payment systems.
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