Marcus Mounir Hanana is the CEO of Panther Life Sciences, a company building a needle-free alternative to injections, transdermals, and pills. He spent nearly 25 years at Procter & Gamble and Amazon. At P&G, he held finance leadership roles across innovation, supply chain, and commercial operations in Europe and Africa. At Amazon, he served as divisional CFO for US Home & Lifestyle before becoming CFO of Amazon Business, which grew from about $25 billion to $60 billion in four years.

November 19th, 11am ET / 8am PT.

Pebl’s Chief Business Officer, Dutta Satadip, joins The GTM Garage to show how Pebl merged Operations and GTM under one leader, and how it aligned goals and incentives across the customer lifecycle.

You’ll also see how Pebl uses AI across that lifecycle and the stack behind prospecting, pipeline, and handoff to onboarding.

15 min conversation. 15 min open Q&A. For Seed to Series A teams.

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When people ask Mounir what Panther does, he answers with a question: what do you know about skin biology? Most know very little, including that skin is built to keep things out. Only about 1% of a topical gets through, and nothing larger than 500 Daltons, so the collagen in a face cream doesn’t get where it’s meant to go. Skin is also unusually rich in immune cells. “We’re commercializing existing skin biology,” Mounir says.

Panther’s SmartPatch™ is a shelf-stable microneedle patch whose needles are made from the formula itself and dissolve once they pass the skin’s outer layer. Its first product, a premium cosmetic line developed with leading U.S. dermatologists, will deliver hyaluronic acid and collagen where creams can’t. A microchip links each patch to an app that guides placement and uses AI to read before-and-after photos, building what Mounir calls “a connection to the consumer nobody has ever built” and data to personalize each regimen.

Cosmetics is Panther’s first step toward what Mounir sees as a platform business, serving consumers on one side and pharma and biotech partners on the other. Potential future applications range from vaccines to infectious disease, cancer, allergies, and autoimmune conditions. By his count, about 2 billion people are untreated and 4.6 billion undertreated, largely because treatments arrive by syringe or pill. The biopharma industry loses about $35 billion a year globally to temperature-control failures, and up to half of vaccines are wasted. A shelf-stable patch, as Mounir pictures it, could be mailed anywhere in a letter envelope.

Panther named Mounir CEO in September 2026 as it moves the SmartPatch to market. Working with Pitt BioForge on manufacturing, Panther completed a clinical safety study in July 2026, is running a 40-person efficacy study, and aims to launch in 2027. The company holds more than hundred IP assets.

Mounir spent 25 years at P&G and Amazon, and he’s careful about how those habits are incorporated in his startup: “It’s not right just to bring the same thing and then stubbornly try to push it through.” Mounir is intentional about bringing three key principles with him:

The consumer is the boss. P&G CEO A.G. Lafley used that line to push teams past their own views to what consumers truly wanted. The hardest part, Mounir says, is your own intuition. He had opinions on male shaving from personal experience but none on feminine care, so when operating in that category, he listened much more closely to end users. The discipline is to listen that way even when you do have an opinion. 

Work backward from the customer experience. Technology companies, in medtech and beyond, tend to start with the technology. Amazon reverses that by having teams write a press release for a product not yet built, which makes the author ask what users would say about it, not which features to highlight. At Panther, Mounir asks whether a proposal reflects what the team thinks or what consumers actually want.

Write it down, at startup length. At Amazon, Mounir’s team prepared its annual operating plan as a written document that took about 1.5 hours to read, leaving no room for misunderstanding. At Panther, Mounir asks for one or two pages that lay out the strategy and execution details that are often left out in pretty PowerPoint slides.

On top of these three key concepts, Mounir and Carlos Bhola, Panther's founder and executive chairman, set a few ground-truth tenets Panther won’t move away from. The first is a top-quality product, with every ingredient from the best producer at the best grade possible. When a trade-off comes up, the team returns to the company’s core tenets, and often the decision is made for itself. That’s why speed versus clinical validation wasn’t a hard call for Panther: a premium product needs clinical proof. Breaking a tenet is possible, but the bar is high enough to force careful, deliberate thinking first.

Carry over the principle, then resize the practice for your stage. Customer focus, disciplined listening, and putting important decisions in writing still work in a team of 20, once you scale them to fit. A few critical principles then make many trade-offs easier to settle.

Panther’s patch is designed to work with a wide range of molecules. Mounir’s view is that a platform like this has to “earn the right to do more via doing the hard things first,” and his advice for a physical product is to get the first one out quickly so the team touches the whole value chain. Planning the product is easy, he says, but production gets hard once it ramps from 10 a day toward 1,000. Even if Panther works out how to put a vaccine into the patch years from now, without the ability to manufacture at scale, “I still have no solution,” Mounir emphasizes.

So Panther is starting in cosmetics, a simpler application that doesn’t require FDA premarket approval, though clinical validation is still important. A new format like the SmartPatch needs real-world use to validate the platform effectively across a wide range of end users.

Good manufacturing follows a crawl-before-you-walk approach, from 5 or 10 patches a day by hand to 100 to 150 in a cleanroom. That’s why Mounir is pushing his team toward a launch date: reaching the point where the product ships gives a startup a different sense of urgency.

Prove the potential of the technology by shipping one simple product end to end. A broad technology platform is easy to discuss and hard to produce. Starting where regulation and risk are lower lets the team get through manufacturing, reach real users, and validate partners early, and a fixed launch date creates necessary urgency. Large-scale applications come once the team learns the hard parts.

Panther has a small team of approximately 20 people, so when the company doesn’t know what to do, the rule is to “call a friend” and find the expert. Founder Carlos Bhola built a network by raising smart money from investors chosen for what they can contribute, a group Mounir would “spend 2 weeks on an island with and I wouldn’t get bored for one minute.”

Advisors are on the call list, too. Ken Gabriel, a former DARPA deputy director who leads Pitt BioForge, helped the R&D team think through how the SmartPatch could be produced in the millions. Another example is Gordon Sanghera co-founder and ex-CEO of, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, who is Mounir’s go-to manufacturing problem-solver.

The two sides also reinforce each other. Advisors who have built several successful companies give investors confidence, and investors who bring connections and knowledge alongside capital make the group more valuable to advisors.

Panther’s first product will be sold through dermatologists, so it built an advisory board of leading U.S. dermatologists, and Mounir listens closely to them since they’ve operated in the space for decades. When a new opportunity is proposed, his first question is what the partnership would offer consumers that they don’t already have today.

Mounir’s biggest lesson, one he’d take to another startup, is that you don’t need every resource on day one. People want to help, as long as they believe in the idea, the product, and its prospects.

A small team can borrow the expertise it can’t afford to hire. Make asking for help a habit, and bring advisors and investors into the same circle, where each makes the other more valuable. People will give their time when they believe in the mission. Hold partners to the same standard, starting with what they add for the end user.