How Campfire Is Beating NetSuite with AI (and $35M in Fuel)
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Hey everyone, this is Eli and welcome back to the show. Today I want to talk about a company that's doing something bold and honestly kind of overdue in the world of business software. The company is called Campfire and they're shaking up the ERP space using AI in a way that actually makes sense. And no, this isn't some fluffy AI is the future fluff piece. This is real. Campfire is winning actual startups away from NetSuite and they just raised $35 million to go even harder.

Let's start with the basics. If you're not deep in operations or finance, ERP might not mean much to you. But if you've ever tried to scale a company, especially on the back end, ERP is everything. It stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, and it's the system that runs things like finances, billing, HR, supply chains, all the unsexy but critical stuff that keeps a company alive.

Now, most startups don't exactly love their ERP systems. In fact, most hate them. In the 1990s, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, those names dominate the space, but they're not exactly built for the way modern startups operate. The onboarding process is a pain. The UIs are dated, and unless you hire consultants or build an internal finance army, good

Good luck getting what you actually need out of them. Campfire is flipping that on its head. This is an AI native ERP platform. Not AI as a bolt-on, AI as the core. It's designed for early and mid-stage startups that don't want to burn time and money just to run basic financial operations. It's fast, it's smart, and most importantly, it speaks human. Here's the wild part. You can literally talk to Campfire like the member of your finance team.

Ask it questions like, what did we spend on AWS last month? Or what happens to our runway if we cut costs by 10%? And it gives you clear answers instantly. This is the kind of functionality CFOs have dreamed about

for years and it's not just talk. One company that switched to Campfire from NetSuite cut their month-end closed classes down from 15 days to three. That's not just better software, that's a productivity multiplier. So who's behind this? The founder is a guy named John Glasgow. He's not your typical YC grad in their 20s,

John has been around. He worked in traditional finance at Fidelity, did investment banking, and then served as CFO at Invoice2Go, which sold to Bill.com for over $600 million. After that exit, he could have chilled out. Instead, he dove back into the startup world and built the product he always wished he had when he was running finance teams.

And I love this part. He joked that when YC hosted a family bingo night, he was the hot commodity because he had kids. That's the kind of founder I love hearing about. Not just chasing hype, but solving real problems they lived through. Anyway, Campire went through YC in 2023, and just two years later, here they are, raising $35 million in Series A funding led by itself, with participation from Foundation Capital, Capital 49, and a

bunch of heavy-hitting angels like Dan Kang from Mercury. That kind of investor list tells you something. These aren't just people tossing cash around. These are folks who've seen the inside of messy, scaled companies, and they're betting on Campfire. One of them is apparently on track to hit $250 million in annual recurring revenue, and they're managing it all through Campfire. That

That's wild. Some of their big customer wins include Advisor 360, Rumbix, Fuji, and Replit. A lot of these came through YC Connections, sure, but the product's clearly doing the heavy lifting once it lands. And the fact that they're pulling clients off of NetSuite, it's a big deal. Because let's be real, companies don't just casually rip out their ERP systems. It's like swapping the engine on a moving car. The fact that people are doing it to use Campfire says everything.

Another thing that stood out to me is how this company thinks about finance, not just as a department, but as a lever for growth. Their product helps with M&A readiness, revenue forecasting, reconciliations, AWS billing breakdowns, and more. These are the exact pain points that kill finance teams' time. Campfire takes those and turns them into five-second tasks. They're also trying to go the community around this vision.

They're launching something called Finance Forward, a summit and community for finance professionals who want to rethink the way financial operations work in an AI-first world. It's smart because culture beats tools, and when you give finance teams something modern that actually works,

They talk about it. So what's the takeaway here? We're watching a big shift in enterprise software. For years, finance tools have lagged behind. Engineers had GitHub, designers had Figma, marketers had HubSpot, but finance still stuck in spreadsheets and old school dashboards. Campfire is saying that stops now. And the market is massive. ERP software was a $56 billion industry in 2024.

that's not a niche. That's a fortress, and it's finally getting disrupted, not by another legacy vendor, but by a tiny focus team building from first principles. It's rare you see a startup hit this kind of traction this fast in a category this entrenched. So if you're a founder, a CFO, or just someone trying to keep your ops from falling apart, keep an eye on Campfire because the future of finance might be a whole lot smarter and a whole lot more human than what we're used to.

All right, that's it for today's episode. I'm Eli, and thanks for hanging out with me on this deep dive. If you liked this episode, drop a rating, send it to someone who runs ops or finance, and subscribe so you don't miss what's next. Until next time, stay sharp, and I'll see you in the next one.