At $7.5 million, the fintech startup Piston closed its seed round. Spark Capital led the most recent round, which raised $6.1 million. Pear VC and BOND also participated. It comes after the PearX accelerator raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding.
The money raised will be put toward growing its network throughout the United States and extending its go-to-market initiatives. Shivam Shah is in charge of the India presence, where all engineering, operations, and customer success are based.
Vikram Sekhon and Shivam Shah, two former fleet operators, founded Piston, a direct payment infrastructure that links fleet drivers and gas stations in place of card-based systems.
Stations connect directly to Piston’s network without the need for hardware upgrades or middlemen, and the platform links payments to vehicle, time, location, and fuel data using a QR-code-based system.
Piston currently processes more than $20 million in annualized volume with a 50% monthly growth rate, working with more than 800 gas stations and 120 fleets. With operations in Lehi and a 25-member engineering and operations hub in Kolkata, which is anticipated to double in size over the course of the next year, it has its headquarters in Cupertino.
