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.
