- Date
- September 23, 2026
- Kind
- Product launch
- Significance
- Moderate
On September 23, 2026, Phave launched a marketing automation platform it describes as AI-native. It was founded by Jon Miller, a co-founder of Marketo and Engagio, and Nick Bonfiglio, formerly executive vice president of global product at Marketo. General availability was reached in August 2026.
The product and its price
- Phave’s “Maestro” engine reasons about people, accounts and buying groups to decide what to do next, instead of following if-then rules.
- Pricing starts at $36,000 a year, based on monthly active recipients rather than the size of the database.
- Named customers include SambaNova, SPS Commerce, mabl, Servion and Hypha.
- Investors are FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Costanoa Ventures; the amount raised was not stated.
Phave also reports a benchmark scoring it 2.97 against 2.46 for HubSpot and 2.38 for Marketo across 481 enterprise requirements. We have not seen the methodology, so it is the company’s claim.
Why it matters
It is an attempt to rebuild marketing automation around AI reasoning, led by people who helped define the category, and its pricing on active recipients breaks from database-size pricing. It is a test of whether rules-based automation is ready to be replaced.
What happened next
Phave was newly launched; independent customer results and integrations with major CRMs had not been published in the sources we reviewed.