Campfire Sparks Funding Surge in AI Accounting Sector

The enterprise resource planning market, long dominated by incumbents like Oracle Corp. and SAP SE, is witnessing a rare insurgent. Campfire, a San Francisco-based startup building AI-powered accounting software, has raised $100 million in just 12 weeks, positioning itself as the fastest-growing challenger in a sector valued at more than $70 billion annually.

The company closed a $65 million Series B round in October 2025, co-led by Accel and Ribbit Capital, barely three months after securing $35 million in Series A funding. The rapid succession of raises signals intense investor appetite for companies promising to modernize the back-office systems that underpin corporate finance operations worldwide.

From Y Combinator to Enterprise Clients

Campfire emerged from Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 batch under circumstances its founder describes as unconventional. John Glasgow, the company’s chief executive officer, arrived at the accelerator program with fifteen years of finance experience at firms including Fidelity Investments, Union Square Advisors, and Adobe Inc. He was on parental leave when he learned of his acceptance.

“One of the bingos was ‘find someone that’s a parent,’ and I was the hot commodity at YC bingo,” Glasgow recalled in an interview, noting his departure from the typical twenty-something founder profile. The background proved advantageous. Glasgow had spent years navigating the limitations of legacy accounting systems, most acutely during the $625 million acquisition of Invoice2go by Bill.com Holdings Inc. in 2021, where he served as vice president of business development.

“I was forced to manage hundreds of diligence requests in Excel because their ERP simply wasn’t up to the task,” Glasgow said. “That’s when I knew something had to change.”

He partnered with Fernando San Martin, a technical co-founder who had led back-end engineering at Trovata, a treasury accounting platform serving companies including Block Inc. and Etsy Inc. San Martin brought expertise in handling large accounting data sets, a capability that would prove central to Campfire’s value proposition. The company has since expanded its leadership, with Paul Nichols joining as chief technology officer to scale the engineering organization.

The Technology Powering the Platform

The core of Campfire’s offering is what the company calls an AI-native ERP, designed from inception around large language models rather than retrofitting artificial intelligence onto decades-old codebases. The platform encompasses general ledger functionality, revenue automation, close management, and financial reporting, all unified on a single system.

In practice, Campfire automates the manual tasks that consume accounting teams. The software automatically itemizes and reconciles cloud computing bills from providers like Amazon Web Services, matches transactions across bank feeds and invoices, and flags anomalies that would otherwise require hours of spreadsheet work to identify. Finance teams can query the system using natural language prompts, generating cash flow analyses, board-ready reports, and detailed breakdowns of metrics like contribution margin by customer or profit and loss by department. The platform handles complex revenue recognition scenarios common among technology companies, including subscription billing, usage-based pricing, and milestone-based contracts, while supporting multi-entity consolidation and multi-currency reporting for global operations.

Central to the company’s differentiation is its proprietary Large Accounting Model, known internally as LAM. Unlike general-purpose AI systems, Campfire’s model was trained exclusively on accounting data, enabling automation of tasks that traditionally required significant manual intervention. The company reports 95% accuracy on key workflows including reconciliations and variance detection, a threshold that Glasgow argues makes AI-assisted accounting practical for enterprise deployment.

“We’re seeing a trend that customers want to put every transaction in Campfire,” Glasgow explained. The platform’s architecture accommodates high-volume data processing that legacy systems struggle to manage, particularly for technology companies with complex billing models including subscription, usage-based, and milestone revenue recognition.

The practical implications manifest in dramatically compressed close cycles. Campfire clients report reducing month-end close processes from fifteen days to three days after migrating from competing platforms. For lean finance teams operating without the staffing levels of larger enterprises, such efficiency gains translate directly to strategic capacity.

Customer Traction Defies Startup Conventions

What distinguishes Campfire from typical early-stage enterprise software companies is the scale of clients willing to entrust their financial infrastructure to the startup. Within nine months of formation, companies with more than 100 employees were replacing established systems like NetSuite with Campfire’s offering.

“I was surprised that there were businesses of this size that were trusting their whole ERP to a 10-person, seed-stage project,” said John Locke, partner at Accel, who led both funding rounds after previously backing Invoice2go. The traction defied conventional wisdom about enterprise software sales cycles and customer risk tolerance.

Current Campfire customers include unicorn-status companies such as Replit Inc., Decagon, and PostHog, alongside publicly traded entities including LimaOne Capital, a subsidiary of MFA Financial Inc. (NYSE: MFA). The company has completed migrations from SAP systems, a significant validation of its capability to handle enterprise-grade complexity.

Brian Ehrlich, finance director at workforce management company Flex, implemented Campfire twice, both times closing books within three weeks of contract signing. “Campfire saved us over $300,000 in implementation costs, avoided hiring one to two full-time staff, and provided us with a scalable system,” he said.

Investor Confidence and Market Opportunity

The funding round attracted participation from Foundation Capital and Y Combinator, alongside angel investors with direct experience managing corporate finance operations. Notable individual backers include Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and chief technology officer at Ramp; Brad Floering, vice president of finance and financial planning at Snowflake Inc.; and Scott Buxton, chief financial officer at Supabase.

The investor roster reflects a thesis that practitioners closest to accounting operations recognize the inadequacy of existing tools. Campfire’s pitch resonates particularly with finance executives who have experienced the friction of legacy systems firsthand.

Market sizing supports the ambitious fundraising. The global ERP software market is projected to reach approximately $73 billion in 2025, according to Gartner estimates, with cloud-based solutions growing at 14.5% compound annual rates. Morgan Stanley has characterized ERPs as the largest category in enterprise software, representing roughly $1 trillion in cumulative market capitalization among public vendors.

“The AI ERP business is massive, and we think John is really the right person to do it,” Locke said, explaining Accel’s decision to lead back-to-back rounds. The firm deployed capital aggressively to ensure Campfire could capitalize on demand that accelerated following the Series A announcement.

Scaling Operations and Strategic Priorities

Since the Series A closed in June 2025, Campfire has expanded from 10 to approximately 65 employees. The company now operates across six continents, serving finance teams that have driven 10x year-to-date revenue growth. Glasgow continues to serve as both chief executive and chief financial officer, a dual role he argues provides clarity between operational vision and financial discipline.

The Series B proceeds will fund deeper investment in AI capabilities, expansion of core accounting modules, and partnerships with next-generation finance teams. The company is also building community through Finance Forward, an industry summit dedicated to equipping accounting professionals with tools for AI-driven operations.

Enterprise expansion remains a priority. While Campfire initially targeted companies outgrowing entry-level platforms like QuickBooks and Xero, demand is pulling the company upmarket. “We’re rapidly getting pulled up market,” Glasgow acknowledged, noting migrations from SAP installations and partnerships with public companies requiring SOX compliance infrastructure.

Challenges and Competitive Response

Campfire faces the perpetual challenge confronting enterprise software insurgents: convincing risk-averse finance executives to migrate mission-critical systems from proven vendors. NetSuite, acquired by Oracle in 2016 for $9.3 billion, continues expanding its customer base. SAP SE and Microsoft Corp. maintain dominant positions across large enterprise segments.

The startup’s response emphasizes implementation speed and total cost of ownership. Traditional ERP deployments often require six months or longer with extensive consulting support. Campfire clients report going live within weeks, frequently without external implementation partners. The self-service approach eliminates consulting fees that can exceed software licensing costs in legacy deployments.

Glasgow projects Campfire’s trajectory toward supporting companies from startup through initial public offering. “I talked to the CFO at a 10,000-employee company still on NetSuite,” he said. “They bought it at 100 employees and scaled to $100 billion in market cap. So how do we get them at 100 and scale with them to 10,000? That’s really where we’re going.”

The Road Ahead

Recent customer conversations have included discussions about Campfire’s next funding round, with clients expressing willingness to validate the company’s balance sheet strength for procurement purposes. The pattern suggests enterprise buyers view Campfire’s capitalization as a factor in vendor selection, creating a flywheel where fundraising enables customer acquisition that justifies further investment.

The company’s ambitions extend to public markets. Glasgow has spoken openly about building infrastructure capable of supporting IPO-stage companies, both as customers and potentially as a corporate trajectory for Campfire itself. With $100 million raised and revenue doubling since the Series A, the path from startup to public company appears shorter than typical ERP vendor life cycles.

For the accounting profession, Campfire represents a broader transformation underway in finance operations. The company’s tagline, “Slack for accounting,” captures an aspiration to make enterprise software as intuitive as consumer applications while delivering the analytical power that modern finance teams require.

Whether Campfire can sustain its growth trajectory against well-resourced incumbents remains uncertain. What seems clear is that the company has demonstrated sufficient traction to attract serious capital in a category that rarely produces venture-backed challengers. In the $70 billion ERP market, even modest share gains would represent meaningful enterprise value creation.

Glasgow’s advice for founders considering similar paths remains characteristically direct: “Build a great business.” In Campfire’s case, that formula has produced $100 million in funding, a rapidly expanding customer roster, and a credible claim on disrupting one of enterprise software’s most established categories.