Campfire Software Inc., a startup with a cloud-based enterprise resource planning platform, today announced that it has raised $35 million in funding.

Accel led the Series A investment. It was joined by Y Combinator, Foundation Capital, Capital 49 and a group of angel investors that included multiple chief financial officers from the tech industry. Campfire previously raised $3.5 million in seed funding.

Companies use enterprise resource planning, or ERP, platforms to power their accounting workflows. Campfire says that its ERP platform makes it possible to complete some financial tasks several days faster than competing tools. According to the company, that value proposition has helped it win over customers from larger rivals such as Oracle Corp.’s NetSuite unit.

Campfire’s ERP platform is built around what’s known as a general ledger. This is a centralized database that contains information on a company’s store sales, expenses and other line items. To make organizing that information easier, users can optionally create sub-ledgers for items such as outstanding obligations.

The typical company’s financial information is scattered across multiple systems. Campfire provides integrations that allow accountants to automatically stream that information into its ERP platform. A finance team could, for example, import expense data from a company’s corporate credit card provider and revenue data from Salesforce.

Some companies have multiple subsidiaries that each maintain a separate ledger. For such customers, Campfire provides a tool that can consolidate different business units’ accounting information into a single dataset. According to the software maker, the tool works even when a company’s subsidiaries operate in markets with different currencies. 

After organizing their company’s financial data, accountants can use Campfire to perform consolidation. This is the process of verifying that financial records are accurate. From there, Campfire can lock the records to prevent future modifications that might introduce errors into the data.

Users can interact with the company’s ERP platform via a point-and-click or a chatbot called Ember. The chatbot makes it possible to search for patterns in financial data using natural language prompts. For example, an accountant could ask Ember to identify the products that drove a recent sales jump at a particular store.

“Our team has rebuilt ERP from the ground up, leveraging the latest in AI and modern architecture so finance teams can accelerate their monthly close, unlock deeper financial insights, and make smarter decisions,” said Campfire founder and Chief Executive Officer John Glasgow (pictured).

The company will use its latest funding round to expand its platform’s feature set with a focus on adding new AI capabilities. 

Photo: Campfire