Campfire Secures $35M Series A for AI-Powered ERP Platform, Challenging Industry Giants

Tiny AI ERP startup Campfire is winning so many startups from NetSuite, Accel led a $35M Series A | TechCrunch

AI-powered accounting startup Campfire announced Monday that it has raised a $35 million Series A led by Accel, with participation from Foundation Capital, Y Combinator, Capital49, and angel investors including Mercury's CFO Dan Kang. "Within nine months of formation, we had customers [with] north of 100 employees ripping out NetSuite and putting in Campfire," founder CEO John Glasgow said. Some of Campfire's customers that have migrated from NetSuite include wealth management platform Advisor360, construction software startup Rhumbix, and customer experience company Fooji, Campfire says. This was, in part, because Glasgow attended YC in the summer of 2023, despite being decidedly more experienced than the typical 20-something YC founder. He described the age difference with a funny story: During a YC bingo event, "One of the bingos was 'find someone that's a parent,' and I was the hot commodity at YC bingo." Glasgow already had a decade and a half career in finance working for Fidelity, Union Square Advisors, and others. When his manager from Adobe left to run an Accel-backed startup called Invoice2go, he took Glasgow with him. Less than a year later, in the fall of 2021, Bill.com bought Invoice2go for about $625 million. Glasgow wound up with both the cash and an idea to build his own startup, one that would automate the drudgery in finance like reconciling payments on bills, revenue forecasts, and -- the part he discovered during the Invoice2go deal -- due diligence for M&A. He launched Campfire in 2023 to upend 1990s-era enterprise resource planning accounting software (ERP) like Netsuite with an LLM-powered alternative. Campfire does things like automatically itemize and reconcile AWS cloud computing bills. It generates detailed cash flow analysis, charts, and answers to questions from natural-language prompts. "One of our customers went from a 15-day to a three-day close when they ripped out NetSuite and put in Campfire," he says about the time to finalize the books each month. YC's famed access to other cohort alums helped him land tech startups as customers, like Sierra AI and Replo. He has since not only landed unicorn fintech startup Mercury as a customer, but its CFO invested. While Campfire is just a gnat in terms of its impact on Oracle's billion-dollar (and growing) NetSuite business, the startup gained enough customers to prove its competitive plausibility. At its seed stage, Campfire grew to around 100 customers and is now up to 12 employees including, Glasgow said, one global customer on track to do a $250 million ARR. "I was surprised that there were businesses of this size that were trusting their whole ERP to a 10-person, seed-stage project," Accel's John Locke, who had backed Invoice2Go, told TechCrunch of what had enticed him with Campfire. Locke typically invests at the growth stage. But given that kind of "traction out of the gates" and a total ERP software market of $56 billion in 2024, according to some market research reports, Locke was in to lead the A. And he was in big. "[The] AI ERP business is massive, and we think John is really the right person to do it. So why don't we do a $30 [million] to $35 million series A, and really go for it?" he told Glasgow and his partners. So they did.

Campfire reels in $35M for its AI-powered ERP platform - SiliconANGLE

Campfire Software Inc., a startup with a cloud-based enterprise resource planning platform, today announced that it has raised $35 million in funding. Accel led the Series A investment. It was joined by Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, Capital 49 and a group of angel investors that included multiple chief financial officers from the tech industry. Campfire previously raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Companies use enterprise resource planning, or ERP, platforms to power their accounting workflows. Campfire says that its ERP platform makes it possible to complete some financial tasks several days faster than competing tools. According to the company, that value proposition has helped it win over customers from larger rivals such as Oracle Corp.'s NetSuite unit. Campfire's ERP platform is built around what's known as a general ledger. This is a centralized database that contains information on a company's store sales, expenses and other line items. To make organizing that information easier, users can optionally create sub-ledgers for items such as outstanding obligations. The typical company's financial information is scattered across multiple systems. Campfire provides integrations that allow accountants to automatically stream that information into its ERP platform. A finance team could, for example, import expense data from a company's corporate credit card provider and revenue data from Salesforce. Some companies have multiple subsidiaries that each maintain a separate ledger. For such customers, Campfire provides a tool that can consolidate different business units' accounting information into a single dataset. According to the software maker, the tool works even when a company's subsidiaries operate in markets with different currencies. After organizing their company's financial data, accountants can use Campfire to perform consolidation. This is the process of verifying that financial records are accurate. From there, Campfire can lock the records to prevent future modifications that might introduce errors into the data. Users can interact with the company's ERP platform via a point-and-click or a chatbot called Ember. The chatbot makes it possible to search for patterns in financial data using natural language prompts. For example, an accountant could ask Ember to identify the products that drove a recent sales jump at a particular store. "Our team has rebuilt ERP from the ground up, leveraging the latest in AI and modern architecture so finance teams can accelerate their monthly close, unlock deeper financial insights, and make smarter decisions," said Campfire founder and Chief Executive Officer John Glasgow (pictured).

Campfire Raises $35 Million for AI-Driven ERP System for Startups | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company will use the new funding to fuel product development, investments in generative AI and expanded reach to serve companies around the world, it said in a Monday (June 30) press release. Designed to fully replace legacy ERPs, Campfire's solution includes a general ledger, revenue automation and close management, according to the release. It also features a generative AI conversational interface called Ember AI that enables finance teams to use natural language to interact with their data, run advanced reporting and automate manual tasks, the release said. "I founded Campfire because, as a customer, I lived through the pain of a legacy ERP that was holding us back," Campfire CEO and Founder John Glasgow said in the release. "Our team has rebuilt ERP from the ground up, leveraging the latest in AI and modern architecture so finance teams can accelerate their monthly close, unlock deeper financial insights and make smarter decisions." John Locke, who is a partner at Accel, which led the funding round, and a board director at Campfire, said in the release that Accel believes Campfire "has the potential to reshape the ERP market." "Campfire's rapid product execution, customer traction and vision for an agentic future make them uniquely poised to lead this next wave of innovation," Locke said. The February edition of PYMNTS Intelligence's "CAIO Report" found that the share of chief financial officers of large firms who said they saw a "very positive" return on investment from generative AI tripled between March 2024 and December. By December, about 88% of the CFOs said they saw a "very positive" ROI on the technology, according to the report.