Campfire just lit up the ERP scene with a $35 million Series A round, and this isn’t your dad’s enterprise software story. This is what happens when someone who’s been inside the machine decides to build a better one. That someone is John Glasgow, a finance vet who lived the chaos of legacy systems at Adobe, Invoice2go, and Bill.com, then did what most don’t, burned the manual and built a product that actually understands the people using it.
ERP has long been a synonym for slow, stiff, and siloed. Midmarket companies outgrowing QuickBooks were forced into SAP and NetSuite, two relics pretending to still run the show. Glasgow saw through the charade. So in 2023, he dropped into Y Combinator and built Campfire, an AI-native ERP that’s lean, fast, and deadly efficient. Not just a better UI on top of the same old beast, this one has a brain, a voice, and the receipts to back it up.
This $35 million round, led by Accel, backed by Foundation Capital, Capital 49, Y Combinator, and a stack of elite angels like Marten Abrahamsen (Vercel), Dan Kang (Mercury), Alex Estevez (ex-Atlassian), Michael Gordon (ex-MongoDB), Sowmya Ranganathan (ex-OpenAI), and Jack Zhang (AirWallex), isn’t just fuel. It’s validation. You don’t pull in this kind of firepower unless you’re building something that scares the status quo.
And here’s the kicker, Campfire isn’t vaporware. It’s already replaced NetSuite and QuickBooks at over 100 companies, slashing close times from 15 days to 3. Clients like Replit, Midi Health, Trust & Will, CareRev, and Coder aren’t waiting on “future roadmap” promises. They’re already live. Already scaling. Already winning.
The stack is modern (Python, Django, React, NextJS), the interface is slick, and the AI, powered by Claude via Ember AI, means financial reporting you can talk to. Like actually talk to. Add 100+ APIs and native hooks into Ramp, Brex, Rho, and Stripe, and you’ve got a system that doesn’t just run finance. It runs with it.
With Paul Nichols now in as CTO (formerly of HomeLight), Justin Alvarado handling success, and Katrina Queirolo driving marketing, the squad’s got the chops. Co-founder Fernando San Martin may have exited in May 2024 to build Thyme, but his fingerprints are all over the tech foundation, and that legacy isn’t fading anytime soon.
$38.5 million raised. 10x revenue growth in 10 months. A team of 13 outpacing incumbents with armies. Campfire isn’t just competing, it’s cooking the old guard over open flame.
ERP needed a reset. Campfire gave it a reckoning.
