Piston raises $15M Series A for cardless fuel payments to fight trucking fraud

Piston's product lives or dies on coverage: a driver pulls into a truck stop at eleven at night, opens the app, finds the station isn't on the network, and reaches for the company card anyway.

Piston says its merchant network grew more than 40 times over the last 12 months while annual payment volume grew eightfold ^[15][16]. Dividing one by the other, payment volume per merchant is now roughly a fifth of what it was a year earlier ^[1]. That is the ordinary shape of a network signing sites faster than trucks route through them, and it is the figure a prospective customer should press on, because stations counted on a map are not stops counted on your lanes.

The loss-prevention case rests on one number. SiliconANGLE attributes the 5% to 15% range to a single report by Wex Inc. ^[5], and the source does not say how the sample was drawn or what counts as fraud. The definition is the part a buyer needs, because the article's own illustration of the problem is a driver adding snacks to a fuel purchase at the company's expense ^[9], which is policy leakage already visible in a fleet's own statements, and it sits in the same bucket as a cloned card number. The top of that range is three times the bottom ^[3]. A spread that wide usually means the thing being counted is defined differently fleet by fleet.

The $900 billion in the source is the size of the US trucking industry ^[4], not aggregate fleet fuel spend, so the 5% to 15% cannot be converted into a dollar market from what is on the page. Anyone running that multiplication is supplying their own denominator.

The one figure here that describes behaviour after the demo is retention, and Piston puts it at 98% ^[17]. It arrives without a cohort or a window, so treat it as directional. It is still a claim about fleets continuing to pay, which is more than a usage chart would tell you.

Two numbers matter before signing. The first is the share of last quarter's gallons bought at stations already on Piston's network. If that share is under half, this is an added payment rail rather than a replaced one, with the old card programme still running underneath it. The second is the total of the transactions you already suspect are leakage, taken from your own reconciliation file. When that total comes in below the cost of running two reconciliations and retraining drivers on who pays for the coffee, the Wex range is someone else's number, and yours is the one to argue from.