Piston Raises $15M Series A for Cardless Trucking Fuel Payments
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Piston Technologies Inc., a San Francisco, California startup that built a cardless payment system so trucking companies can buy fuel for their fleets, has raised $15 million in Series A capital. The round was announced on September 10, 2026.
FPV Ventures led the Series A, with Spark Capital and Pear VC, both seed investors, participating again. Piston has now raised $22.5 million in total.
The company is targeting payments inside the roughly $900 billion US trucking industry, where fleets still buy enormous quantities of fuel using conventional commercial payment tools. In practice that means operators hand drivers fuel cards or company credit cards. Those cards invite fraud and make it hard to see daily fuel spending. A report from Wex Inc. estimated that the average trucking firm loses between 5 and 15 percent of its annual fuel budget to the problem.
Co-founders Vikram Sekhon, the CEO, and Shivam Shah, the COO, ran commercial truck fleets before starting the company and dealt with fraud, hidden transaction costs, and the administrative grind of reconciling payments themselves. Their answer is a two-sided cardless network that links fleets directly to gas stations. The system authorizes a purchase for a specific driver and vehicle at the point of sale through a QR code scan, and records the fuel volume, cost, time, and location of every transaction. With no card in play, drivers cannot add snacks or other items to the company’s tab.
The platform also includes two AI features. Piston Guard evaluates individual transactions as they happen so companies can set rules and block suspicious purchases before they process. The Piston Analytics Agent lets operators dig into fuel spending without hours of manual review.
For fleets, the pitch is live visibility into fuel spend and no physical cards to issue or track. For merchants, it means a dependable repeat customer with lower transaction costs, plus in-store sales from drivers paying with their own money.
Over the past 12 months Piston has grown its merchant network more than 40 times over, driving an eightfold rise in annual payment volume, and it reports a 98 percent customer retention rate. The network is now accepted at more than 2,000 gas stations across 48 states. The company plans to reach every US region within 18 months, and after that to expand beyond fuel into broader logistics payments infrastructure. FPV Ventures pointed to fuel being one of the largest B2B spend categories in the country and to Piston moving money over its own rails without card networks or intermediaries in between.
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