Marketo co-founder Jon Miller launches Phave at $36,000 a year

25 September 2026 — Marketo co-founder Jon Miller launched Phave on 23 September with pricing starting at $36,000 a year, based on monthly recipients rather than database size, the company said in its launch announcement.

Phave emerged from two years of development and had reached general availability in August, the company said. Miller founded it with Nick Bonfiglio, formerly executive vice-president of global product at Marketo. Phave names FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Costanoa Ventures as its backers.

Phave charges for monthly reach

Phave says its annual starting price is tied to the number of people who receive something in a given month. That differs from pricing based on the size of a customer’s stored database, the comparison the company uses to explain its model. A marketing team’s monthly outreach, rather than its total contact list, is therefore the measure Phave says it uses for pricing.

The company is seeking to replace platforms including Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and HubSpot. Miller also founded Engagio, which was sold to Demandbase in 2020, MarTech reported. Adobe acquired Marketo in 2018, CMSWire reported. Those existing platforms are the competitive targets for a founder returning to the category in which he built his earlier business.

Salesforce and HubSpot each introduced agentic campaign tools at their flagship conferences one week before Phave’s launch, CMSWire reported. Adobe also has Marketo agents in beta. Phave is entering alongside new products from companies whose marketing platforms it wants customers to replace.

Maestro selects each person’s Playlist

Phave says its Maestro engine assembles a “Playlist” for each recipient from campaigns created and approved by marketers. It orders and times contacts against an objective set by the marketing team, while taking account of other campaigns queued for the same person. The company says consent, contact frequency and quiet hours remain governed by explicit rules.

Traditional automation relies on rules set in advance for segments, lead scores and email sequences, according to Phave. Its proposed replacement uses AI to choose between approved campaign contacts. Miller told MarTech that the campaigns supply the material while the system determines its order for each person.

Phave also says it maintains separate records for accounts and buying groups, each with its own score and lifecycle stage. Several buying groups within an account can be at different stages, the company says. That structure is intended to let marketers address a group considering an expansion separately from one that made an earlier purchase.

Teams can use Phave through its own interface, an existing AI client or integrations built with Model Context Protocol and a versioned REST API, the company says. Phave says the same permissions and approvals apply across those routes. The platform exposes 319 tools through Model Context Protocol, and Miller said early adopters report building campaigns two to three times faster.

Servion reports higher execution volume

Phave lists SambaNova, SPS Commerce, mabl, Servion and Hypha among its enterprise customers. Miller said the platform supports marketing operations across 10 companies. Bruce Eidsvik, chief growth officer at Servion Global Solutions, said in Phave’s announcement that his company had “more than doubled our marketing execution volume” using the platform.

Phave has also published its own comparison with established products. The company says it assessed 481 requirements from twelve enterprise evaluations, with Claude scoring and weighting each requirement. Phave put its score at 2.97, compared with 2.46 for HubSpot and 2.38 for Marketo. Those are results of Phave’s assessment of itself and its competitors.

Phave says Miller and Scott Brinker of chiefmartec will discuss the platform’s approach to marketing automation on 29 September at 10:00 AM PT.