“Slack for accounting” wants to go public

Accounting software isn’t usually considered the most thrilling type of tech product, but startup Campfire, which offers a general ledger enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform with a user-friendly interface, has an origin story to rival other trendy startups.

Bay Area-based? AI-enabled? Fast-growing? VC-backed? Check, check, check, and check. Founded in 2023, Campfire now has hundreds of clients, including unicorns like vibe coding platform Replit and conversational AI company Decagon. This year, Campfire raised $100 million in two nearly back-to-back Series A and Series B rounds.

John Glasgow, its founder, CEO, and CFO, recently spoke with CFO Brew about fundraising, how he balances his dual roles, and why Campfire’s positioned for growth.

Solving “broken” accounting software. Glasgow developed Campfire because he felt that accounting software could be much better. He had worked in finance for years before becoming a founder, as director of finance and strategy at Adobe and vice president of business development and partnerships at AR company Invoice2go, which he helped sell to Bill.com in 2021, and then joined Bill.com as VP of business development. His experiences showed him “how broken core accounting was,” he said, with monthly cycles requiring a great deal of manual work.

Campfire “was born out of his own experience and frustration,” investor John Locke, partner at venture capital firm Accel, said. “I think that’s how a lot of great companies are born, out of that same dynamic.”

In 2023, Glasgow applied to startup accelerator Y Combinator, which has helped launch around 5,000 companies, including such heavyweights as Airbnb, DoorDash, Dropbox, and Reddit. His application consisted of a lightweight web app with a “full three statement model in Google Sheets.” He was on parental leave from Bill.com for the birth of his daughter when he learned he’d been accepted. He never went back, instead devoting himself to launching Campfire.

Campfire aims to disrupt. The ERP market for midsized companies, Campfire’s niche, is dominated by a handful of big players like NetSuite and Sage Intacct. 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 in terms of performing tasks like reconciliations and transaction coding,” Glasgow said. What sets Campfire apart is that it has “automate[d] a lot more of the transactional accounting.”

Campfire has also incorporated AI since the outset, using its own foundational model, which it calls a “large accounting model,” or LAM. Its AI capabilities could make it well-suited to examining large numbers of transactions. Auditors, in particular, are moving toward examining more transactions rather than sampling, Glasgow said. “That has been a challenge for legacy ERPs, because that means you have to put all of the transaction data into the ERP.” But Campfire is built to handle large volumes of data. “We are seeing a trend that customers want to put every transaction in Campfire,” he said.

Campfire is also built to be user-friendly, with what Glasgow calls a “consumer-grade interface.” Time-to-value for traditional ERPs, Glasgow said, is often six months or more, but customers report quick implementation of Campfire. Tax filing software platform April, for instance, went live with Campfire in just two days.

Raising capital. Campfire received $35 million in its Series A round in August 2025, and $65 million in its Series B in October. The first round was led by Accel and the second by Accel and Ribbit Capital.

Investors liked the fact that Campfire had a large potential market. “There’s so many CFOs and finance teams around the world that want to try to use an AI-enabled ERP,” Locke said. Accel funded Campfire twice “to make sure that we’re capitalizing the team enough to be really aggressive around meeting that demand,” he said. Campfire now has “about 65” employees, Glasgow told us.

The key to fundraising success? “It’s a boring answer: Build a great business,” Glasgow said. But he noted that Campfire has what venture capital firms are looking for: the ability to disrupt a large market. Morgan Stanley has called ERPs the largest category in the software market, with about a $1 trillion market cap. Glasgow’s advice for raising capital is to have plenty of irons in the fire: “You want to run them all in as tight a window as possible, and draw them all to a conclusion concurrently,” he said. “And then, ideally, get multiple offers at the same time.”

Many hats. Being both CFO and CEO is a juggling act. The dual roles provide insight and require “ruthless prioritization,” Glasgow said: “I think there’s a lot of clarity that comes with being both, because then I know the financial side and the vision side of the company.”

And at this stage in Campfire’s growth, the vision side often wins out over the short-term financial one. For instance, Campfire offers to buy out new customers’ existing ERP contracts, and has set aside $5 million for that purpose. “That makes no financial sense at all,” Glasgow said, but it’s a move that’s been popular with customers and has brought the company positive buzz.

IPO-bound. Though Campfire has received acquisition offers from interested parties, Glasgow said he’s not looking to sell. Instead, he’s looking toward an IPO. “There’s a very clear path to going public here,” he said. Getting to that stage, he said, means that finance will become a larger part of decision-making—which means he’ll eventually have to doff his CFO hat and hire a finance chief.