Piston Technologies raises $15M to expand its cardless payments tech for gas-guzzling truckers
Piston Technologies Inc., a startup that has built a cardless payments system for commercial trucking companies to buy gas for their fleets, said today it has raised $15 million in Series A capital.
The round was led by FPV Ventures and saw participation from Spark Capital and Pear VC, which backed its earlier seed round. It has now raised $22.5 million to date.
The startup is trying to solve the pain of payments in the U.S.’s massive $900 billion trucking industry, which is still stuck with using commercial payments technologies to buy the oceans of fuel their gas-guzzling fleets require to criss-cross the country.
In practice, this means that fleet operators have to give their drivers fuel cards or even company credit cards to purchase more gas when they’re empty. But this is problematic, as such methods result in a lot of fraud and make it difficult for fleet operators to visualize their daily spending on gas. Fraudulent payments are no joke in the trucking industry, with one report by Wex Inc. estimating that the average trucking firm loses between 5% and 15% of its annual fuel budget due to this problem.
