Our Investment in Campfire: Building the Future of AI-Native ERP

ERP systems are at the heart of every company’s operations. One of the largest markets in software, it underpins how businesses manage their finances and strategic decision-making. Yet despite this critical role, the world’s most prominent organizations still rely on ERP systems built for a different era: monolithic, rigid, and slow to adapt. Oracle, SAP, and Intuit have each built massive businesses on ERP foundations, but their products were shaped in a different century, and it shows.

Finance leaders, mired in manual work and struggling to keep pace with the demands of modern growth, don’t need incremental improvements. They need a step change. This is the moment Campfire was built for. 

Campfire is reimagining ERP as AI-native, intuitive, and purpose-built for high-velocity finance.  Campfire Founder and CEO John Glasgow spent years wrestling with outdated or ERP systems. Now, his team’s turned this experience into a platform that unlocks sharper insights and curtails drudgery. One that already supports multi-entity financial management, automates document ingestion, and delivers reports that would typically take days to produce. Campfire’s AI-powered conversational interface, Ember AI, lets users query data in plain English, streamlining everything from routine tasks to advanced reporting. The experience is less like running a report and more like having a chat with your data.

The company’s early customer adoption signals a rare opportunity to reshape a global market expected to reach $220 billion (per Morgan Stanley). Companies like Replit, Solv, Trust & Will, Midi Health, Flex, Advisor360, and Coder have already left legacy systems behind, drawn by Campfire’s blend of intuitive UX, thoughtful automation, and ease in handling complex organizational structures. In total, Campfire has replaced NetSuite and QuickBooks at more than 100 companies, including some of the world’s most forward-thinking AI startups.

This is not the first time Accel has worked with John. We previously partnered at Invoice2go, where he helped grow the startup into a category leader, culminating in a $625M+ acquisition by Bill.com. During that sale, John felt the pain of the legacy ERP customer firsthand: he was forced to manage hundreds of diligence requests in Excel because their ERP simply wasn’t up to the task. 

By leading Campfire’s $35 million Series A, alongside participation from Foundation Capital and Y Combinator, Accel continues our long tradition of backing category-transforming companies. Campfire isn’t simply updating the modern ERP system. They’re setting out to redefine a market and reshape what’s possible in the AI era. 

To the entire Campfire team, welcome to the Accel family. To John, welcome back. We look forward to partnering with you on this journey, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.

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