Cardless Payments Startup Piston Raises $15 Million in Series A Led by FPV Ventures, Kolkata Engineering Team Powers US Expansion
Piston, a cardless payments platform connecting commercial fleets with gas stations and convenience stores across the US, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by FPV Ventures, with existing investors Spark Capital and Pear VC also participating, taking its total capital raised to $22.5 million.
Here's the India connection that makes this relevant. While Piston is headquartered in Cupertino, California, the company runs its core engineering centre out of Kolkata, meaning the technology powering this entire US payments network is being built by an India-based team, a pattern increasingly common among global fintech startups tapping Indian engineering talent for product development.
The problem Piston is solving is a genuinely large one. In America's $900 billion trucking industry, fleet operators still hand drivers physical fuel cards or company credit cards to buy gas, a system plagued by fraud and poor spend visibility. Piston replaces this entirely with mobile authorization technology built directly into the point of sale, authorizing purchases by driver and vehicle rather than by card, and moving fuel payment money over its own rails without card networks or intermediaries sitting in between.
The growth numbers from the past year are what caught investors' attention. Payment volume grew 8X year-over-year, the merchant network expanded 40X, and customer retention held steady at 98%. The platform is now live at over 2,000 fuel stations across 48 US states, with point-of-sale integrations covering more than 95% of the country's merchant fuel sites.
The product roadmap goes beyond simple payments too. Piston is building two AI-powered tools, Guard, which evaluates every transaction for anomalies and can flag or block suspected fraud before it completes, and an Analytics Agent that lets fleet owners query spending data in natural language instead of manually digging through reports.
Founded in June 2024 by former fleet operators Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah, the company plans to use this fresh capital to build out national coverage across every US region within 18 months, while adding senior leadership across key parts of the business.
From a Kolkata engineering desk to fueling America's trucking fleets, Piston's Series A is proof that India's tech talent is increasingly building the infrastructure running businesses far beyond its own borders.
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— Sandeep Raiza