I have been obsessed with closed payment loops for a LONG time, and have been looking to find a company trying to solve a real problem.. excited to finally back Piston (piston dot com) ⛽️
USA alone spends hundreds of billions in fuel. Most of that spend comes through cards (credit, fuel, or sometime house cards). However, a lot of these cards are not even tied to a particular driver. They often get stolen, skimmed, or misused. The fleet owner then has to eat the fraud and then spend a long time reconciling what exactly happened. The gas station has to pay interchange fees to accept the card, but has no relationship with the fleets on the other side. And a lot of companies have come and gone trying to optimize this infrastructure rather than thinking about it from the very beginning.
You really can't fix this issue by JUST building a better fuel card. The card is the problem, and so Piston decided to get rid of it. It moves the payment over its own rails without networks or any intermediaries. Piston pays the station and then invoices the fleet. Every transaction is tied to a specific driver with the time, location, and fuel type attached, and soon it'll be integrated with the vehicle itself.
The founders faced this problem themselves.
@vik_sekhon runs his own fleet of trucks, and his fleet lost real money to fuel fraud.
@Shivam2291 used to recruit thousands of drivers before the two of them got together to help build Piston. The best signal for how effective Piston is for fleets is the moment they switch over to Piston, they see their fuel spend automatically go down. I have seen so many charts and customer quotes that show this directly.
Customer love shows in the metrics. Payment volume has grown 8x and merchant network has grown 40x while retention has stayed above 98%. Piston is now live across 2,000 stations and across 48 states. Fleets pay nothing for it today and they get fraud prevention, which is what a card-based system cannot offer. Gas stations get direct access to fleets to help build loyalty and offer adjacent products.
To increase their reach, Piston is now directly integrated with POS of the majority of gas stations in America. This allows them to turn on hundreds of gas stations at once, secure supply and hence fulfill their already burgeoning demand.
Thrilled to be leading their Series A and joining the board, along with existing investors
@sparkcapital &
@pearvc. Special thanks to
@arpans who introduced me to this team last year!