In the cutthroat world of enterprise software, where legacy giants like NetSuite have long dominated back-office operations, a San Francisco startup called Campfire is igniting a revolution. Founded in 2023 by serial entrepreneur John Glasgow, Campfire has raised $100 million in under a year, doubled its revenue in mere months following its Series A, and attracted high-profile customers ripping out incumbents for its AI-native platform. Customers, from AI unicorns to pre-IPO firms, are now urging the company toward its next funding round, signaling explosive demand in a market ripe for disruption.

Campfire’s ascent began with a $35 million Series A in June 2025, led by Accel with participation from Foundation Capital, Y Combinator, Capital 49, and angels like Mercury CFO Dan Kang. Just four months later, in October 2025, it secured a $65 million Series B, bringing total funding to $100 million including a prior seed. “Within nine months of formation, we had customers [with] north of 100 employees ripping out NetSuite and putting in Campfire,” Glasgow told TechCrunch.

The company’s platform replaces clunky 1990s-era ERP systems with a unified general ledger, revenue automation, close management, and AI-driven insights via its Ember AI interface, powered by Anthropic’s Claude models. Finance teams query data in natural language, automate reconciliations, and generate forecasts without SQL or spreadsheets. One customer slashed close time from 15 days to three, according to Glasgow in multiple reports.

From Invoice2go Veteran to ERP Disruptor

Glasgow, wearing dual hats as CEO and CFO, brings battle-tested credentials. With 15 years at Fidelity, Union Square Advisors, Adobe, and Invoice2go—which he helped sell to Bill.com for $625 million—he spotted ERP’s glaring gaps during M&A due diligence. “Our accounting workflows and financial reporting was all in spreadsheets, because our ERP simply wasn’t built for modern teams,” he wrote on Campfire’s blog.

Despite joining Y Combinator’s summer 2023 cohort as an outlier—”One of the bingos was ‘find someone that’s a parent,’ and I was the hot commodity,” he quipped to TechCrunch—Campfire quickly proved itself. Early adopters like Advisor360, Rhumbix, Fooji, and YC alums Sierra AI and Replo ditched NetSuite. By late 2025, hundreds of clients included unicorns Replit and Decagon, plus public companies and IPO-bound firms.

Glasgow’s co-founder Fernando complements his finance expertise; together, they’ve scaled prior ventures like Trovata for treasury at Block and Etsy. Campfire now boasts 12 employees post-Series A, quintupling headcount recently while operating lean. “We are on track to 20x revenue this year,” Glasgow said in a CFO.com interview.

Legacy Giants in the Crosshairs

NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, and Xero dominate mid-market ERP, but complaints abound: manual reconciliations, inflexible implementations, and high costs. Campfire targets startups outgrowing QuickBooks and mid-sized tech firms frustrated with NetSuite’s rigidity. “Companies like that did a great job of bringing you from on-prem into the cloud, but we’re seeing everybody is still very manual,” Glasgow told CFO Brew, dubbing his product “Slack for accounting.”

Flex, a customer, cut close time from 10 days to three using 67% fewer resources, per reports. Coder’s controller Daniel deCoen praised its handling of complex contracts: “Campfire is the AI-native ERP flexible enough to keep up.” Trust & Will echoed the sentiment for scaling financial challenges. Accel’s John Locke, who backed Invoice2go, was stunned: “I was surprised that there were businesses of this size that were trusting their whole ERP to a 10-person, seed-stage project.”

Campfire supports multi-entity consolidation, multi-currency, advanced revenue reporting, and SOX compliance—key for IPO readiness. “What I want in 2026 is for the IPO markets to stay open and for more companies to go public while running their accounting… on Campfire,” Glasgow told CFO.com.

AI Engineering Fuels Differentiation

Off-the-shelf LLMs falter on accounting precision, so Campfire built its own “large accounting model” with a dedicated San Francisco AI team, funded by Series B proceeds. “Large language models have been terrible at accounting, so we built our own,” Glasgow explained. This enables audit-ready automation, cashflow forecasting, and transaction coding.

Headcount exploded fivefold in months, yet operations mimic a Series A: ruthless prioritization. Glasgow’s dual CEO-CFO role ensures alignment: “I think there’s a lot of clarity that comes with being both, because then I know the financial side and the vision side.” The $100 million war chest addressed procurement hurdles for enterprise clients seeking stability.

Recent buzz peaked with a January 22, 2026, San Francisco Business Times profile: revenue doubled post-Series A, customers pushing for more capital. Harj Taggar of YC tweeted in October 2025: “Campfire (YC S23) is growing at remarkable speed.”

IPO Ambitions and Market Momentum

Campfire eyes public markets, positioning as the ERP for AI-era growth. One early customer nears $250 million ARR. Public firms and pre-IPO teams cite its balance sheet as a green light. “We’re rapidly getting pulled up market,” Glasgow told CFO Dive.

Founded amid the AI boom, Campfire rethought workflows “from an AI-first mindset.” Ember AI turns data into conversational insights, slashing manual toil. Events like Finance Forward, its AI summit for finance pros, build community. As ERP incumbents bolt on AI, Campfire’s ground-up rebuild gives it an edge in speed and intuition.

With revenue velocity at 20x, customer evangelism, and investor fervor, Campfire isn’t just sparking interest—it’s fueling a blaze. Glasgow’s vision: scale from 100-employee startups to 10,000-employee publics, proving AI can transform finance from cost center to growth engine.