Marketo Co-Founder Jon Miller Launches Phave, Marketing Automation That Reasons Instead of Following Rules

After two years in stealth, Phave replaces legacy platforms like Marketo and HubSpot with AI that decides what each person, account and buying group should receive next

BURLINGAME, Calif., Sept. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Phave today came out of stealth as an AI-native marketing automation platform, built to replace Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and HubSpot. The company was founded by Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and Engagio, and Nick Bonfiglio, who ran product and engineering at Marketo. Phave reached general availability in August 2026 and is used by enterprise marketing teams including SambaNova, SPS Commerce, mabl, Servion and Hypha.

Every decision a legacy marketing automation platform makes is a rule somebody wrote in advance: who belongs in a segment, what a lead is worth, which email comes next. Rules cannot handle ambiguity or judgement, so every case has to be spelled out ahead of time. Most mature programs end up running two or three nurture tracks, not because their buyers are simple but because that is what a rules system can handle.

Phave reasons instead. Maestro, the intelligence inside Phave, computes a Playlist for each person: the touches most likely to reach the objective the marketer set, ordered and timed for that individual, following the rules and governance the team keeps in place. Before anything goes out, Maestro weighs everything else queued for that person across every campaign. Campaigns are the albums, made and approved by the marketing team, and the Playlist mixes them into the right order for each listener.

"Rules are good at what is allowed, but bad at deciding what is best," said Jon Miller, co-founder and CEO of Phave. "Consent, frequency and quiet hours should be rules. Choosing which of two good emails a person should get was never a job for a rule. Reasoning models can make that choice now. The legacy platforms stopped innovating years ago, and marketers are ready for something built for how B2B works today."

In Phave, marketers can describe what they want in plain language instead of translating it into configuration, so campaigns, audiences, scoring and automations no longer get stuck behind whoever knows the platform. Phave can be operated through its own interface, through the AI client a team already uses, or headlessly through MCP and a versioned REST API, with permissions and approvals enforced the same way whichever door a request comes through.

Phave also treats accounts and buying groups as records in their own right, each with its own score and lifecycle stage. One account can hold several buying groups at once, at different stages, some prospect and some customer, which is what makes marketing to the committee that expands an account rather than the one that bought it possible.

"With a traditional platform, going after a single account with four global sites and buyers across IT, finance and service operations is practically impossible," said Bruce Eidsvik, Chief Growth Officer, Servion Global Solutions. "You end up narrowing your choices and making exclusions. Phave's playlists work out when and how to reach each person, which is the part we could never guess, and we've more than doubled our marketing execution volume."

Phave scored itself and the legacy platforms against 481 requirements drawn from twelve enterprise evaluations, with each requirement scored and weighted by Claude rather than by Phave. Phave came out at 2.97, against HubSpot's 2.46 and Marketo's 2.38, and matched or beat every platform evaluated on at least 90% of the requirements. The analysis methodology is published at phave.com.

Phave starts at $36,000 a year, priced on the number of people who receive something in a given month rather than on database size. Jon Miller and Scott Brinker of chiefmartec will discuss what marketing automation becomes when it is rebuilt around AI on Tuesday, September 29 at 10:00 AM PT. Registration: https://phave.com/future-of-marketing-automation-29-Sep-2026

About Phave

Phave is AI-native marketing automation, built to replace legacy platforms. Where those platforms run on rules a specialist has to write and maintain, Phave's AI reasons about every person, account and buying group. Marketers describe what they want to happen and Phave works out the rest, computing for each person the sequence of touches most likely to reach the objective, inside the rules the team keeps in place. Phave was founded by Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo and Engagio, and Nick Bonfiglio, formerly EVP of Global Product at Marketo. It is backed by FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Costanoa Ventures.

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Phave