Marketo Co-Founder Jon Miller Unveils Phave to Take on Marketo

The Gist

• Marketo’s co-founder targets Marketo. Jon Miller’s Phave replaces rules-based campaign logic with AI that decides what each person, account and buying group receives next.
• A long-running argument, now a product. Miller has pushed for continuous conversations and buying groups for more than a decade, much of it on the record with CMSWire.
• Pricing breaks from database size. Phave starts at $36,000 a year, priced on the number of people who receive something each month.
• Incumbents are not standing still. HubSpot and Salesforce unveiled agentic campaign tools the week before Phave launched, while Adobe has Marketo agents in beta.
• Switching remains the hurdle. Miller himself has described marketers’ fear of changing platforms as “marketing automation Stockholm syndrome.” 

Jon Miller helped build the marketing automation category. Now he is trying to replace it.

Miller, co-founder of Marketo and later Engagio, brought his new company, Phave, out of stealth this week with an AI-native marketing automation platform built to replace Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and HubSpot. That’s straight from the press release on the news.

The launch arrived one week after Salesforce and HubSpot each used their flagship conferences to introduce agentic campaign tools of their own. 

What Is Phave, Jon Miller’s Challenger to Marketo and HubSpot?

Phave was founded by Miller and Nick Bonfiglio, who ran product and engineering at Marketo. And those in the marketing technology world know Marketo well. The San Mateo, Calif.-based provider owned marketing automation circles alongside of standalone players like Eloqua and Pardot before they got scooped up: Oracle acquired Eloqua in 2012; Salesforce grabbed ExactTarget’s Pardot in 2013; and Adobe acquired Marketo in 2018.

On to 2026. Phave reached general availability in August after two years in stealth, and it lists SambaNova, SPS Commerce, mabl, Servion and Hypha among its enterprise customers. Phave is backed by FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Costanoa Ventures.

How Phave’s Maestro Engine Replaces Campaign Rules

The company’s argument is that legacy marketing automation depends on rules written in advance, such as who belongs in a segment, what a lead is worth and which email comes next. Phave’s intelligence layer, Maestro, instead computes a “Playlist” for each person: the touches most likely to reach a marketer’s stated objective, ordered and timed for that individual, within the governance rules the team sets. Campaigns built and approved by marketers act as the source material.

“Rules are good at what is allowed, but bad at deciding what is best,” Miller said in the launch announcement. “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.”

Phave can be operated through its own interface, through a team’s existing AI client or headlessly through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and a versioned REST API. The platform also treats accounts and buying groups as records with their own scores and lifecycle stages.

Bruce Eidsvik, chief growth officer at Servion Global Solutions, said in the release that 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.”

Related Article: 3 Ways Marketers Move Beyond AI Tools to AI Thinking

How Much Does Phave Cost?

Phave starts at $36,000 a year, priced on the number of people who receive something in a given month rather than database size. 

What Makes Phave Different From Legacy Marketing Automation?

According to its founders, Phave replaces predefined campaign rules with AI that decides each person’s next touch, while keeping consent and frequency rules in place.

Inside Phave: Founders, Platform, Pricing and Market Position

Editor’s note: The following table highlights the most important lessons, actions and strategic considerations emerging from Phave’s launch as an AI-native challenger to Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and HubSpot.

Key AreaWhat HappenedWhy It MattersRecommended ActionFoundersJon Miller (Marketo, Engagio) and Nick Bonfiglio (former Marketo product and engineering lead) founded Phave.The team built the category it now aims to replace and knows the incumbents’ limits firsthand.Judge the product against Miller’s long-published thesis, not only the demo.LaunchGeneral availability in August after two years in stealth; public launch one week after Dreamforce and UNBOUND.Phave enters just as incumbents reset expectations with their own agent launches.Evaluate Phave alongside the incumbents’ fall releases, not in isolation.Decision engineMaestro computes a per-person Playlist from marketer-approved campaigns, ordered and timed toward a stated objective.Content selection shifts from segment rules to individual-level optimization.Audit which existing rules are true governance and which are content-selection logic.GovernanceConsent, frequency and quiet hours remain hard rules.Compliance controls stay explicit while AI handles next-best-touch decisions.Document compliance and frequency rules before any pilot.Data modelAccounts and buying groups are records with their own scores and lifecycle stages.This matches how B2B buying committees actually purchase.Assess buying-group data quality in your CRM before migrating.AccessAvailable through a native interface, an existing AI client, or headlessly via MCP and a versioned REST API.It fits teams moving toward agent-driven, interface-optional stacks.Test Phave with your current AI client and integration team.PricingStarts at $36,000 a year, based on people reached each month rather than database size.Costs scale with engagement, not with stored contacts.Model costs using monthly reach counts against your current contract.Customers and backersCustomers include SambaNova, SPS Commerce, mabl, Servion and Hypha; backers are FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Costanoa Ventures.Heading into the wild with financial backing and established customers.Check with existing customers on success stories.Competitive fieldHubSpot Marketing Studio and Breeze, Salesforce Campaign Agent, Adobe Marketo AI (beta) and Oracle Fusion agents.Incumbents are narrowing the gap, and Salesforce offers agentic features with no migration.Compare roadmaps and weigh no-migration upgrades against a platform switch.Switching riskMiller names marketers’ fear of breaking lead flow and compliance as “marketing automation Stockholm syndrome.”Migration risk could be Phave’s main adoption barrier.Run a parallel pilot on one segment before any full cutover.

Miller’s Long Road Back to Marketing Automation

Miller has spent two decades arguing about how marketing technology should work, much of it on the record with CMSWire.

In 2014, while serving as Marketo’s vice president of marketing content and strategy, Miller told CMSWire the industry was moving away from campaigns toward “continuous conversations.” In the same interview, he said of Adobe: “They have a lot of integration work to do to stitch all that stuff together. Our ‘wow’ factor is that we’re not just pretty on the outside. It all works together really, really nicely.” Adobe acquired Marketo in 2018.

Miller left Marketo in 2015 to co-found Engagio, an account-based marketing platform, with a $10 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital. He’s been taking on Marketo ever since, all the way up to today.

After Engagio raised a $22 million Series B in 2016, Miller told CMSWire, “I’ve seen this movie play out at Marketo. I know what it’s like to build a SaaS marketing company. We’ve gotten to 50-customer milestone significantly faster than Marketo did, and frankly with significantly more capital than Marketo did at the same stage”

In 2017, Engagio hosted its own event directly across the street from Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit in San Francisco, where he said: “I want every single attendee at the Marketo Summit to know that Engagio is the ABM leader.”

Demandbase acquired Engagio in 2020.

In an April 2025 CMO Circle interview with CMSWire, Miller outlined much of what Phave now sells. He said AI could “automate the automation” and compared the ideal system to a Spotify DJ assembling human-created songs into a personal playlist. He also argued for buying groups as the core unit of B2B marketing: “Leads are too narrow. Accounts are too broad. Buying groups are just right.”

In that interview, Miller again took to salvos against Marketo, saying, “especially since Adobe acquired Marketo, I’m not seeing a lot of innovation happening there.” 

Related Article: 10 Ways the Adobe-Marketo Acquisition Will Impact Marketo’s Users

Why Does Miller’s History Matter to Buyers?

Miller described Phave’s core ideas publicly long before launch. Buyers can judge the product against a thesis he has argued for more than a decade.

How Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle and HubSpot Are Answering With Agents

Phave arrived one week after two of the four platforms Miller called out held their biggest events of the year. Salesforce’s Dreamforce ran Sept. 15-17 in San Francisco, and HubSpot’s UNBOUND ran Sept. 16-18 in Boston. Both companies used their events to introduce agentic campaign tools. Adobe has shipped AI agents and an MCP server for Marketo Engage in beta, while Oracle’s latest Eloqua release focused on interface and data quality updates.

What’s the Latest With Adobe Marketo Engage?

Adobe’s May 2026 Marketo Engage release introduced Marketo AI, a suite of agents designed to automate time-consuming marketing functions, with two agents available and more planned. The release also added a Marketo Engage MCP server that connects AI assistants to Marketo and exposes more than 100 operations across forms, programs, smart campaigns, leads, emails, lists and folders. Both are in open beta.

Adobe now describes Marketo Engage as marketing automation “now with an agentic experience.” Several capabilities on its list of latest and upcoming innovations are marked as coming soon, including an agentic user experience for building multitouch journeys, AI agents for lead list enrichment, program validation and Smart List creation, and an AI Assistant for product knowledge.

Adobe positions buying group engagement, a concept central to Phave’s pitch, under a separate product, Journey Optimizer B2B Edition. Adobe was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, according to the company.

What’s the Latest With Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot)?

At Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce introduced Campaign Agent for Marketing Cloud. The agent works from a marketer’s goals, guardrails and brand guidelines to create, run and optimize campaigns, assembling audiences, content, journeys and channels aligned to a marketer-defined goal.

In June, Salesforce said its marketing platform exposes campaign management capabilities as MCP tools, allowing marketers to orchestrate workflows from interfaces such as Slack.

For Account Engagement, the B2B product formerly known as Pardot, Salesforce is steering customers toward its newer platform without a forced migration.

“Where Account Engagement automates rules-based nurture, Marketing Cloud Next adds AI agents that engage in real two-way conversations, build audiences from plain language, and adapt campaigns continuously.” The company says every Account Engagement customer automatically gets access to its agentic marketing features through Account Engagement+, with no migration required.

What Is the Latest With Oracle Eloqua?

Oracle’s Eloqua 26C release, which rolled out Aug. 7-22, centered on the platform’s Redwood interface, including a new Redwood Campaign Canvas in early preview. The release also added enhanced auto-click detection that evaluates click sequences using multiple signals to produce more accurate engagement data, in controlled availability, along with new email reporting metrics and reporting API improvements. The 26C highlights did not list new AI agents.

Oracle’s AI agent announcements for marketers have come at the Fusion Cloud Applications level. In February, Oracle introduced role-based agents for marketing, sales and service, including an Audience Analysis Agent, a Copywriting Agent that drafts copy for emails and landing pages, and an Image Picker Agent. Oracle’s Eloqua product team, led by head of product Thamina Christensen, presented a product vision and roadmap update to customers in June.

What Is the Latest With HubSpot?

HubSpot used UNBOUND to launch its Fall 2026 Spotlight release on Sept. 16, which it called its most foundational product release. The update includes a rebuilt Breeze Assistant that takes natural-language requests, determines which specialized HubSpot agents are needed and coordinates work across them, as well as a self-updating Smart CRM that captures calls, emails and meetings automatically.

For marketers, HubSpot expanded Marketing Studio, a campaign workspace it first introduced in October 2025, with campaign and content agents coordinated through Breeze Assistant. HubSpot said early customers are creating 81% more campaigns with Marketing Studio. The release also introduced Context Home, which scores the completeness of a company’s CRM context, and an integration with ChatGPT Ads.

How Does Gartner See the B2B Marketing Automation Tech Landscape?

For the record, Gartner in its 2025 Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation sees it breaking down this way: HubSpot, Adobe, Creatio, Oracle and Salesforce as leaders; BUSINESSNEXT, Act-On Software, LeadSquared, SugarCRM and Freshworks as niche players; Microsoft as a visionary and Zoho as a challenger.

Related Article: HubSpot Debuts Breeze Assistant & Self-Updating CRM

How are the incumbents responding to AI-native rivals?

HubSpot and Salesforce launched agentic campaign tools days before Phave arrived, and Adobe has agents in beta. Buyers now face a choice between retrofitted platforms and AI-native entrants. 

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