This founder raised $103M to fix general ledger accounting software

^{A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.}

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One of the best ways to innovate in AI is disrupting legacy processes that are broken or in need of a redesign. This founder spent decades in corporate finance and was involved in a $625M sale, where he experienced first-hand how one part of the finance stack hadn’t been modernized. So he set out to change that.

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John Glasgow has spent his career in corporate finance. He’s held roles at Fidelity, Adobe, Invoice2go, and Bill.com. Glasgow led the $625 million sale of Invoice2go by Bill.com, where he learned how challenging accounting and financial reporting was for mid-sized companies. 

“I was forced to handle 500+ diligence requests in spreadsheets because our revenue accounting, SaaS reporting and consolidations lived in spreadsheets,” he said. Glasgow came to the thesis that general ledger accounting software was broken, which gave him the conviction to rebuild ERP – long considered an unglamorous category – from the ground up. 

Glasgow applied to Y Combinator to build out his idea for an AI-native ERP for modern finance and accounting teams. 

“The YC partners said it was the first time that someone had applied with such a strong founder-market fit to build a modern general ledger. We built the first version of Campfire in Google Sheets, wired up with live Ramp and Mercury feeds, and had a paying customer within a month of starting the batch,” Glasgow shared. 

In most of their deals, Campfire is competing against legacy ERPs. “Our customers choose us because we help them close 5x faster every month, have instant visibility into pressing finance questions, and scale their business without growing headcount.” 

Beyond that, we ship product features faster than anyone else, we're proven with public companies on audit and controls, and we have the best AI in the category. Part of that is because Ember, our proprietary foundation model, is trained specifically on accounting data rather than general text and images. We’re the only ERP that has its own foundation model, AI agent platform, and ERP built into one,” Glasgow explained. 

As CEO and founder, Glasgow did every sale himself until Campfire’s $35 million Series A with Accel. This helped him deeply understand their customers and what was important to them. 

“When we were first starting out, I hosted a group of 12 finance and accounting leaders from around the country for a two-day working session where we mapped out Campfire’s product roadmap. That cohort became our beta users,” he said. 

“When we were ready to go to market, we focused on building exceptional relationships with our customers through top-tier support paired alongside a great product. Building loyalists early allowed us to grow rapidly through community expansion and word of mouth.” 

One of Campfire’s biggest drivers of speed is staying in-person, five days a week. They have officers in San Francisco, New York, and London. “Getting face time with prospects is also extremely important for us as a growth channel, both at events, through product demos, and via sponsored communities.” Glasgow is so bullish on IRL that they’re putting on their own AI summit, Basecamp, for over 400 in-house finance and accounting professionals. 

Glasgow said that in finance, AI hallucinations aren’t an option the way they might be in other categories. They’ve had to rebuild their model, from generating answers directly to writing deterministic code, so the output is consistent every time. 

“On the team side, we tap multiple engineers for every product manager, and we're deliberately careful about how much of our code is AI-generated versus human-reviewed, because the more a person is involved in writing it, the more durable and well-architected it tends to be,” he said. 

Glasgow believes AI-native will stop being a differentiator and start being the baseline expectation for financial software. “Being an incumbent used to mean being the safe choice but not anymore.” Glasgow said Campfire will be the last job he ever has and plans to go public. “I have to think beyond three to five years in terms of vision and long-term roadmap.”

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