Campfire raises $35M Series A led by Accel to modernize ERP for high-growth companies

finance exec for about 15 years and just lived the pain. Thank you. Operation unsung heroes. The unsung heroes.

Um never featured in the all hands but uh we're working on changing that here and uh lived in spreadsheets my whole life and just helping I don't think they're going anywhere anytime soon but helping folks take all the transactional accounting all the financial reporting and get it into software.

And so campfire is the modern ERP for high growth companies to just help them uh move to an AI uh powered platform. And so that's we do. How young were you when you realized you wanted to build the modern ERP? Uh I would say it's not something you think of growing up.

It's not like I'm sure kids I'm sure some ambitious kids these days think I'm going to build I'm going to build the nextG ERP. Go ahead. You'd be surprised. So going into White Cominator, there's about 4,000 companies that have gone through it, but they probably hundreds of thousands apply.

They're like, you know, no one came to us and said, "We want to build a new ERP. " They're like, "You're you're like the only one excited about the category. " So, um, I would say I this was in 2020 2021 when I really was feeling the pain at a midsize company that I'm like, "This is the largest category in software.

Why is nobody disrupting it? " And that's that was a that was a critical moment for me. Well, it's interesting because it's it's not going to fit the pro like you need to have lived and breathed the problem to know what to build. And I think that YC has like the the sort of default type of founder that does that.

Maybe they have a few years as an engineer at Palunteer or they were a product manager at Coinbase or something like that. is very different than being like on you know being in being in the seauite actually living and breathing and and having that ability to go and figure out what to build.

Give us the latest on the fundraising side. Yeah, we announced today Excel is leading our $35 million series adulations. [Music] You like hitting the gong. Uh I I want to talk you said high growth.

Um I remember I was running a company and uh there was a big debate over like oh like you know like thank goodness we don't need to implement Oracle we get to implement Netswuite and it was like still a lot of work. It was a big big ERP.

Uh and so it seems like uh the the playbook is is start with high growth startups be the first ERP and then scale into that and then eventually you'll be able to service the really really large Fortune 500 companies. But it's it's fair to say that you're not ready to go into a Fortune 500 company today. Is that right?

And how do you think about actually growing the business long term? You said it well. We're hiring on the sales team. So, we would love to have you, but in all seriousness, uh we are not ready for the Fortune 500 yet. We do have customers with hundreds of millions in ARR that have ripped out SAP.

They've ripped out Netswuite. They've ripped out everything below that. So, we are filling the pullup market quickly. And one of the reasons for the raise is to go make us enterprise ready. Sure. And our customers are saying, I don't want to be on an ERP for a few years, right? I want to be on it for 10 plus.

I talked to the CFO at a 10,000 employee company still on Netswuite. They really scaled into a hundred billion dollar plus market cap on Netswuite and they bought it at 100 employees. Yeah. And so like how do we go how do we get them at 100 and scale with them to 10,000 and and that's really where we're going. Yeah.

I mean pretty sharp guy running the company over at Oracle. it is a competitive market.

Um, but it does seem like there's there's lots of pockets of opportunity because uh the the I mean I I remember just like the implementation bill for Netswuite was going to be like half a million dollars in consulting or something like that. It was it was pretty staggering.

How do you think about pricing and getting uh a growth stage company to actually match the value that you're delivering with the money that you make? It's obviously great if you get a big contract up front and they're locked in for a long time and they're paying this massive implementation bill.

There's real costs to you if you have to implement stuff. Um, how how are you thinking about uh ramping a customer into a great profit center for you long term? Yeah. Um, first off, like we rethought the whole implementation process for the reasons you've stated. Like you tell your accounting team, we bought an ERP.

Like everyone's ready to quit. Nobody wants to go through a one-year implementation. Yep. And so we've made it where like you give us a log into your old system, we go do all the work because everybody says, "I just don't have time. Our team is way too lean to do this.

" So a lot of the switching costs to your point, a lot of it is just like dollars, but a lot of it is just time. So we've solved for both.

But to your point on like how do we get them into a profit center um we're just very focused on getting them in the door and making people super happy because we know like customers drive customers like referenceable and one of your sponsors ramp has done a great job at driving referenceability and customer love has really been I think the the verality within the finance and accounting community.

It's been a huge driver of their growth and so we're focused on the same. How are you guys uh leveraging AI internally and then in the in the product itself? Never heard of it. Irrelevant. Don't need it. What it stands for? I'm not familiar. Yeah. Yeah. Don't need it. Built different. Yeah. We're doing it all.

Everything's if statements over here. Yeah, I know. You know, I found I forgot what it was, but Excel's if statement limit. I like over, you know, you That's the final boss of ERP. You have to build an ERP after you hit the limit on XL.

You just unlock a like like Sacha Nadella just comes through the computer and says, "Good, you you've broken out of the matrix. Welcome to the big leagues, writes you a check.

" Um, anyway, our very first version of Campfire was I built a three-statement model that was framed into uh like a login and it was it was me on the back end running a Google sheet a three-statement Google Sheets for customers. Wow. So, you got to start somewhere. Um but uh yeah, we're super excited about AI.

So obviously one thing about us relative to the incumbents is like we are investing and putting AI everywhere, but whether it's Meta winning the AI talent war or Open AI, like we're always going to be on the latest models and we're always going to be multi model.

And so we're going to be inheriting all of the amazing work of all of these amazing AI engineers. And we're of course building out our own proprietary AI models.

Um, but the gap between us and the incumbents is growing every time a new model ships irrespective of a vendor because we're always putting in the latest models. A few examples.

Customers are uploading their board minutes from the last meeting and saying take all of our row every row and campfire of every financial data and come up with a story narrative for the next board meeting and it's it's reading the board minutes.

It's going through and it's like here's the five things you should focus on based on all of it. Um on the accounting side it's automating a lot of the accounting. Um but we've built like a chat GPT for your finance and accounting data. It'll write to the ledger. it'll report for you.

Um, customers are saying like kind of feels like we got a promotion. I'm not in there doing formatting my y and x- axis anymore. You know, the charts are coming out uh through AI. And that that's been exciting to me because I I live that pain, guys. I had a diligence report. I had to build the day of my wedding. Wow.

That's pretty because we were we were in a bad ERP. So, don't be me. You know, enjoy your wedding day. Enjoy your wedding day. Uh last question for me in the news. Uh Zero acquired the US uh the American B2B payments company Melio for three billion. I think this was announced last week. Two and a half.

Uh who who's who's counting at this point? Um can you explain to me like what the rationale you think was behind that? Why? And and Zero feels like a different tier of product, not full ERP, more accounting suite for small businesses. Why would they need a payments product?

Are you thinking about payments as a potential uh revenue generator in the future, whether it's through Stripe or Stable Coins or maybe you're going to buy an payments firm at one point? I don't know. Yeah. So, um I can go really deep on this one.

So, as deep as you guys want to go, but at invoice to go, we were an air company, 250,000 businesses. We were powering their invoicing globally in 150 countries. We competed with Melio. We sold to Bill. com. Obviously, they're a titan in AP, a billion in in AP revenue. And so I I know Zero and Millia well.

Um I'll say Zero was really looking to be stronger in the US market. They're very strong in Australia, New Zealand, very strong in Western Europe and other parts of the world. QuickBooks, unsurprisingly given their headquarters is here is dominant in the US. Melio brings a strong footprint.

QuickBooks also launched their own AP products and Zero needed a response to that. Sure. And so getting into the payments game, getting into APA in that solo entrepreneur category where I came from at Invoice to go is where Zero and Melio have a lot of strength. We don't compete with either at all.

Y so we're really like a cut above. So no competitive angle for for Campfire. Um but I think one that actually no one has really covered is Melio is very strong in indirect. So Ferve and others and this is public. um Fiser and others are are selling uh Melio through their channel.

So Clover and other systems are out and so this is a new go to market