- Outer Bio keeps donated human skin alive outside the body for four weeks
- The Massachusetts startup has raised $23 million and screens 750 million compounds a year with AI
- It joins a wave of musicians moving from co-signs to cap tables, but this one is science-first
Stefani Germanotta has spent a decade building Haus Labs into one of the more credible celebrity beauty brands on the market. What almost nobody knew is that she has also spent six years on the board of a biotech startup trying to keep human skin alive outside the body for a month at a time.
Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga, introduced the world to Outer Bio and its discovery platform, Yuna, in an Instagram post on August 21.
“Meet Outer Bio and Yuna. We are building the future of skin health,” she wrote. The company, legally named Outer Biosciences, was co-founded in 2020 by her fiancé, Michael Polansky, alongside chief scientist Kyung-Jin Jang, chief technology officer Chris Hinojosa, and chief business officer Stanley King.
Polansky serves as chief executive; Germanotta sits on the board.
A different kind of celebrity biotech
Musicians turning fandom into funding is not new. Tech Funding News has tracked Adele backing London royalty-tracking startup Audoo alongside Elton John and U2’s Adam Clayton, and Kesha launching her own creator-rights platform, Smash, after years fighting to reclaim ownership of her own work. Selena Gomez took a similar founder route with the mental health startup Wondermind.
Elsewhere, the celebrity cap table has become its own distribution strategy: when AI shopping app Phia disclosed the roughly 30 cultural figures behind its $35.5 million Series A, from Sydney Sweeney to Priyanka Chopra Jonas, the names were the marketing.
Outer Bio does not fit that mould. It has no consumer product, no retail launch and, according to Polansky’s interview with TechCrunch, was deliberately kept quiet even from close friends, for years.
Germanotta’s role has been limited to the boardroom: she is not among the four people TechCrunch names as 2020 co-founders, and a company spokesperson confirmed to Billboard only that she holds a board seat.
Keeping donated skin alive for a month
The company’s technology centres on Yuna, a platform that keeps donated skin functioning outside the body, or “ex vivo,” built from surgically discarded tissue, mostly leftover material from plastic surgery, sourced through biobanks operating under institutional review board oversight. Skin removed from the body typically dies within about a week.
Outer Bio says its proprietary support system, which keeps nutrients moving into the tissue and waste moving out, extends that window to roughly four weeks while preserving the tissue’s original molecular structure.
Slow biological processes, chronic inflammation, collagen remodelling, ageing-related tissue change and barrier repair, unfold over weeks, not days. Researchers can induce ultraviolet damage in living tissue and then track the stress and recovery response as it unfolds, rather than relying on the short-lived assays that dominate the industry today.
Layered on top is a machine-learning system that can, Outer Bio claims, computationally pre-screen around 750 million compounds a year, narrowing an enormous chemical universe down to a shortlist that then gets tested against the living tissue. Results feed back into the model right or wrong, sharpening the next round of predictions.
Polansky says the loop now produces a new candidate roughly every six weeks, up from a couple of leads every eighteen months when the company relied on manual literature mining.
Outer Bio is chasing cosmetic ingredients rather than drugs; it skips the FDA approval process entirely. What it can’t skip is safety testing: a candidate needs a standardised industry name and clearance under guidelines set by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Paris-based body whose member states accept each other’s properly run studies.
Only after that can a partner brand license or buy the ingredient and turn it into a serum or cream. Four of the six current leads are already moving through that process. The company says it is generating revenue today through research collaborations, including one with a pharmaceutical partner investigating why certain cancer drugs trigger severe skin rashes, though most individual partners have not been named publicly named.
What comes next
Outer Bio has raised approximately $23 million to date from early backers, including Wing Ventures, Initialized Capital, and Polansky’s own firm, Hawktail, among others. It employs 19 people, almost all of whom are based just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The approach sits within a wider wave of AI-driven biological discovery that TFN has tracked closely: Proxima raised $80 million to design drugs around protein interactions, while Chai Discovery tripled its valuation to $3.8 billion in seven months, driven by its AI molecule-design platform.
Both are pursuing therapeutics at a scale far beyond Outer Bio’s current ambitions; Outer Bio’s approach is narrower and, for now, squarely focused on skin.
Whether that narrower focus helps or hurts is genuinely unclear. Philadelphia-based rival Vivodyne, which builds lab-grown organ tissue rather than working with donated human skin, has raised close to $80 million of its own, led by Khosla Ventures.
Outer Bio’s edge, if it has one, is that its dataset does not exist anywhere else: no scraped internet of biology to lean on, just years of accumulated tissue-response data that a competitor cannot simply download.
Germanotta’s name is what got people to look. What holds their attention, or doesn’t, is a Yuna preprint published earlier this year that validated the tissue platform itself but stopped short of validating the AI discovery engine on top of it. That’s the gap between a good idea and a proven one, and right now Outer Bio is still on the wrong side of it.
