Vikram Sekhon and the Investor Meeting at a Fuel Pump

Vikram Sekhon took a prospective investor to a gas station. The trip ran from the Bay Area into California’s Central Valley, and the demonstration involved a driver buying fuel. No conference-room choreography was required. A pump would either work or it wouldn’t. For a founder selling a different way to pay, this was an unusually economical presentation: the customer did the talking by getting on with the day.

Sekhon later described the outing with Nikunj Kothari of FPV Ventures. The founders had no pitch deck when they met him; Kothari wanted to see the product working anyway. Watching a driver fuel without a card made the proposition tangible. An investor meeting had acquired a destination, a practical test and, presumably, rather less comfortable seating than the usual boardroom.

The episode suits Sekhon’s particular claim to attention. He is Piston’s co-founder and chief executive, but he also continues to run trucks. His argument about fleet payments comes with an operating business attached. When a payment system fails at a pump, he has customers to answer to and a fleet of his own that needs to keep moving.

A complaint measured in truckloads

Before Piston, Sekhon was dispatching between 120 and 250 trucks a day. At that scale, fueling becomes a management problem as much as a driving task. Each purchase produces a question: did the right person buy the right fuel for the right vehicle? Multiply that question by a working fleet and the receipt drawer begins to look like a second occupation.

He described trying conventional business credit cards and established fleet cards. Fraud persisted. Fees were difficult to predict. Reconciling purchases consumed time that an operator could have spent running the business. Fuel ranked behind only payroll among his expenses, so the frustration sat close to the center of the company’s economics.

That history matters because it makes his original question quite concrete. A fleet owner already knows that trucks require fuel. What the owner needs is a defensible connection between a purchase and the work the vehicle is supposed to be doing. An account number, by itself, leaves a surprising amount of that story untold.

“Fuel was our second-largest expense after payroll, and the most chaotic to manage.”

Vikram Sekhon

Sekhon and fellow fleet operator Shivam Shah built Piston around those frustrations. Sekhon became CEO; Shah became chief operating officer. Their experience gave the partnership a shared starting point: both had been on the buying side of the problem. They were asking other fleet owners to reconsider a routine they had already found expensive themselves.

Give the purchase a memory

Piston’s early payment experience used secure, dynamic QR codes generated through its app. The transaction carried information about the vehicle, fuel type, location and time. The intention was to give the fleet manager a live record with operational context, rather than a payment that would need detective work after the fact.

The current product puts mobile authorization directly into participating merchants’ point-of-sale systems. A driver chooses a pump in the app. Piston checks the request against identity, vehicle and fleet rules before allowing fuel to flow. At enabled locations, the pump unlocks directly. A familiar roadside stop acquires a less familiar set of checks behind the screen.

The detail reveals Sekhon’s way of framing the problem. He wants the system to understand a commercial vehicle as part of the purchase. The driver matters, but so do the truck, the station and the conditions under which the fleet has agreed to pay. Those relationships are more useful to an operator than a piece of plastic’s ability to be swiped.

In the earlier operating model Sekhon described, Piston paid the station and then invoiced the fleet. That arrangement also changed the timing of information. Managers could see a purchase as it happened instead of waiting for a batch of transactions to arrive. For someone who had spent hours reconciling records, the appeal of an immediate answer needs little embellishment.

The other person at the pump

The fleet owner is only one of the customers Sekhon has to understand. There is also the person who operates the station. Piston needs places where its drivers can stop, and station owners need a reason to welcome another payment network. Software alone cannot supply either party with the other.

Sekhon’s own buying experience exposed the opportunity. He had been spending millions on fuel without receiving the sort of pricing he thought that volume should command. Piston’s direct merchant relationships allow fleets and stations to negotiate offers around commercial demand. An individual driver may appear briefly at a pump; the business behind that driver can represent a recurring customer.

In his public writing, Sekhon has emphasized that commercial drivers return on predictable schedules and buy frequently. He has also drawn attention to what they spend inside convenience stores. His interests have expanded from controlling the fleet’s outgoing dollars to helping the merchant see the value of the incoming ones.

The company’s customer accounts make the two sides visible. Apollo Transport describes reporting that takes seconds rather than hours of matching drivers to vehicles. One Stop Fuel describes additional monthly gallons sold. These are different measures of usefulness, and Sekhon’s task is to make them reinforce each other. A station with attractive terms gives a fleet somewhere to go; a returning fleet gives the station a reason to keep offering them.

A founder who still has to fill up

Sekhon describes his own fleet as Piston’s first customer. In a recent public account, he said more than 100 of his trucks across seven states use the system daily. The company also identifies his fleet as the first environment for validating new features. The product therefore has a route back into the circumstances that prompted it.

There is a useful discipline in that arrangement. A founder can describe a workflow in a meeting, then discover what that description omitted when real people try it. A driver at a station has an immediate objective. Getting the payment product to behave is an interruption, and the operator ultimately hears about interruptions.

Keeping a fleet while building a payments company places Sekhon on both sides of that conversation. He can ask what a customer needs and encounter the same need in his own operation. That connection does not answer every question about how a network scales. It does give his product decisions a regular appointment with the workday.

From the first fleets to a wider map

The founders joined PearX’s winter 2025 cohort. Pear’s account of their time in the program describes a team advancing beyond its growth targets and moving from a prototype to revenue. For Sekhon, the accelerator connected an operator’s complaint with the capital and company-building support needed to turn it into a network.

By June 2025, Piston had announced $7.5 million in total funding, including a $6.1 million seed round led by Spark Capital and an earlier $1.4 million pre-seed. Pear VC and BOND participated. The money was intended to expand the team and recruit more fleet and station partners. The practical burden was becoming larger than the original product.

In September 2026, a $15 million Series A led by FPV Ventures brought total funding to $22.5 million. Spark Capital and Pear VC participated again. Piston reported eightfold annual payment-volume growth and deployment at more than 2,000 stations across 48 states. Those figures describe the company’s reported position at the announcement, rather than a promise about what every driver will encounter.

The map kept changing. On October 14, Piston announced that 341 Jacksons Food Stores locations were live across the western United States. Sekhon described the benefit in the language of route planning: more places to stop give operators more flexibility. After the funding announcement, the next useful unit of progress was another place to buy fuel.

The destination is an ordinary stop

Sekhon’s ambition extends beyond the first fuel transaction. Piston plans to use national fuel coverage as a foundation for broader logistics payments. It has also introduced Guard, which reviews transactions for anomalies, and an Analytics Agent for querying fleet spending. These products address work that remains after the pump has stopped: checking exceptions and understanding where the money went.

For the CEO, expansion brings a demanding test of his original insight. More merchants need to be brought onto the network. More fleets need dependable coverage along the routes they actually drive. A technically compatible point-of-sale system still needs a participating merchant behind it. The map must become useful at the level of a driver’s next stop.

That is why the Central Valley demonstration makes a fitting introduction to Sekhon. It reduced a substantial business proposal to an observable event. Someone needed fuel, used Piston and continued with the day. The investor could see the transaction instead of imagining it from a slide. The founder could point to a working answer to a problem he knew.

The ambition is considerable; its successful expression is wonderfully uneventful. A driver arrives. The system recognizes the purchase. A fleet manager can account for it. Sekhon’s company grows if enough of those ordinary moments happen in enough useful places. Somewhere among the funding rounds, the merchant agreements and the software releases, he still has trucks waiting for their next fill.