The Man Who Built Marketo Just Launched Its Replacement

Jon Miller co-founded Marketo in 2006 and helped turn rules-based marketing automation into a $4.75 billion acquisition. Last week, he came out of stealth with Phave — an AI-native platform built on the premise that everything he built at Marketo is now the wrong way to do marketing.

That is a remarkable thing to say about your own life’s work. It is also the right call.

What Phave Actually Does Differently

Traditional marketing automation — Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, Eloqua — runs on triggers and rules. A contact downloads a whitepaper, they get added to a nurture sequence. They visit the pricing page three times, a rep gets an alert. These workflows are explicit, rigid, and require someone to design every branch in advance.

The problem is that B2B buying in 2026 does not follow a flowchart. Buying groups are larger and more distributed. Research happens across more channels than any automation logic can track. The gap between “triggered a nurture email” and “ready to talk to sales” is increasingly hard to map with if-then logic.

Phave replaces that logic with AI reasoning models. Instead of following rules a marketer wrote six months ago, the system decides what each person, account, and buying group receives next based on real-time context. It can handle ambiguity, exceptions, and the inherent messiness of how humans actually make buying decisions.

Miller has been blunt about the comparison: in a competitive evaluation, Phave scored 2.97 out of 4, against HubSpot at 2.46 and Marketo at 2.38. The platform reached general availability in August 2026, with enterprise customers including SambaNova, SPS Commerce, and mabl already using it before the public launch.

The Pricing Model Change Matters Too

Marketo and HubSpot built their pricing around database size. The bigger your contact list, the more you pay. This was fine in an era where building a large database was the goal.

Phave prices on reach — specifically, how many people receive something in a given month. At $36,000 a year starting price, it is targeting teams that want a more direct connection between what they spend and what they actually send to people. For companies with large, dormant databases, this changes the economics considerably.

Phave is backed by FirstMark Capital, Ridge Ventures, and Costanoa Ventures.

What This Means for Business

The launch of Phave is not just a product story. It is an early signal of something larger happening across enterprise software: the founders of rules-based systems are themselves concluding that AI reasoning has made those systems obsolete.

This is the same shift happening in CRM (Salesforce replacing Agentforce’s trigger logic with long-horizon agents), in customer service (Fin and Intercom replacing ticket queues with autonomous resolution), and in back-office operations (AI agents replacing the workflow automation tools that replaced manual work a decade ago).

The pattern is consistent: wherever you built rules to approximate human judgment, AI can now provide the judgment directly.

For business owners, the implication is not “replace your marketing automation immediately.” Most businesses are still getting value from the tools they have. But the planning horizon for technology decisions has shortened. If your current stack is rules-based — and most business software stacks are — the next generation of replacements is already shipping.

The companies that move early tend to get the best terms, the most hands-on onboarding, and the most influence over how the product develops. The companies that move last inherit whatever decisions the early adopters made.

Enterprise DNA works with businesses navigating exactly this kind of technology transition. If you are looking at your current stack and wondering which parts AI has quietly made obsolete, that is worth a conversation.

Book a discovery call with Sam McKay to talk through where the gaps are in your current operations.