Campfire raises $65M Series B just 12 weeks after its Series A — building the AI-native ERP

AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest has been waiting too long in the reream waiting room. We'll bring him in now to the TVP and Ultradome. Sorry for keeping you waiting. John, how are you doing? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Here he is. How are you?

Hey guys, I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me today. Of course. Uh, congrats on the massive news. Uh, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company and then we'll go into the news. Yeah. Well, it's wild. I was on three months ago.

Uh we were talking about our series A and I was not planning on reaching out to you guys for for a year or two and uh I went to bed a series A founder woke up a series B founder and so today uh we we announced $65 million series B bringing 100 million. Thank you. Thank you. We have a smaller one of those.

We have a smaller one of those in the office. Uh let's go. Well series B up the gong size. You should have a gun for every stage. Yes. Yeah. Well, look, I'm still st I'm in New York right now. I'm still staying in the seed stage hotel rooms here. Um, but we've we've come a long way.

So, yeah, that 100 million was all in the last 12 weeks. So, it's um it's exciting times. It's an AI native ERP if you're not familiar with Campfire taking on the mid-market incumbents and the incredible demand we've seen has just led to us to go out to market again on the round. Yeah. What was the key?

Why do you think uh it's uh huge category, bunch of different ways that you could attack it, bunch of different kind of verticals within it. Uh why why have VCs come around to like funding a bunch of ERPs again?

Because there was an era where they got funded and a lot of them didn't go very well and uh something's different this time. But what why do you think that is? Yeah, it's a great question. going through white combinator. They call them perpet ideas. Ideas that like perpetually get funded and go to die.

And for like 10 or 20 years, this category has just had a lot of there's a lot of gravestones in this category. This is the personal CRM. That's the that's a grave tarpit idea. The personal CRM. Every VC says, "I need a personal CRM. " It's like, "No, you just need a real CRM. You're doing business. " Yeah. Yeah.

You know, they're a lot on a lot on the social media side. Um, and so when we're out doing a seed, there was a little bit of squinting and then we had incredible demand. Uh, and then going into the A, they're like, "Wow, this category is on fire. " And since the A just had overwhelming demand.

I think there there's a couple themes. Certainly, the incumbents are all 25, 30 years old. You guys were talking about zero revenue IPOs earlier. I mean, literally, these companies were founded when Pets. com, Webban were public companies.

Um and so it's it's come a long way um in terms of like it's time for something new. You know, one of your sponsors, RAMP, has really like um pioneered like consumer grade software within the finance stack. And so I think we're seeing a huge demand for I just want the ramp for GL.

And then we're also seeing huge demand for we need to buy AI. There's literally no AI ERP out there. Uh with today's news, we announced we're the first ERP to have our own actual foundational model. Mhm.

And so we've trained this like rich accounting data set and so accountants are finally like I hate doing bank rack and that's always been true but now there's actually someone you know an AI model that can take on bank rack for me.

For those who don't know bank reconciliations is like a cruel like some of these just very transactional accounting tasks. They're allowed they can now actually offload them to a credible foundational model.

they can just like allow them to focus on on higher value work, strategic work, things as a former finance exec I really enjoyed doing. And so there's this big mindset shift uh that we are really uh driving home and seeing a ton of value for our customers.

You guys work with uh Decagon, Replet, and a bunch of other AI companies. Are you seeing new like entirely new uh needs surface that people want out of their ERP that legacy ERPs besides just uh speed, usability, just yeah, ease of use, etc.

Yeah, I mean this big shift and I know you just had reductto on like the sheer volume of transaction data the legacy ERPs are we've just heard from customers are just unable to physically handle and so like being on a modern stack these AI usage based companies have you know hundreds of thousands millions tens of millions of rows of transaction data that we can easily ingest and allow them to scale on the platform and then we can apply our AI layer to this rich data set and allow them to operate in ways they just fun fundamentally were not able to before.

So the shift in you know you think of if you have 10 million rows of accounting data you can't fit it on an Excel spreadsheet right it just physically taps out and and so it's more of an engineering problem that they're starting to face when they have that that much transaction data and so we've been really helpful in allowing allowing them to not become engineers and focus on what they do best at accountants.

That makes sense. Are you worried about getting preempted again? Are you announced? I'm assuming. I'll tell you next week. We're doing our series C. Let's go. Yeah. I'm sure it'll be nice to take take a breather and and just, you know, build and build the team and all that stuff, but for for two days. Yeah.

For at least two days. For at least one. Every VC listening, just schedule it now. Congratulations. We appreciate you. I'll be there. That's actually good. We We should start. Yeah. Yeah. Please come by. We'd love to We'd love to hang out. We can go way deeper.

Bring the biggest you going to bring the biggest gong you've ever seen. Love it. We can implement an ERP live. That's what the fans want. Let's do it. Let's roll it out. We We've done 24hour, you know, Netswuite to Campfires. We've done SAP to to Campfire in weeks, you know, and the the world's shifting fast.

Um but yeah, to your point, we'll we'll do one live on on the show. We'll do it live. That's show biz. I love it. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon. Great progress. Thanks, guys. Cheers. Get me off of Larry Ellison's plate. That's a That That's a bold move. I like it.

It's very aggressive. It's a hot He's distracted. He's focused on the AI boom. He is going to find out about his baby. He's going to He's He needs to needs to step up. I mean, the the story of