Lady Gaga sat on the board of a biotech startup for six years, and almost nobody noticed. The company, Outer Bio, has now stepped into public view with $23 million in funding and a platform that keeps donated human skin alive outside the body for a full month.
The reveal came through Gaga’s Instagram post on August 21, where she introduced Outer Bio and its discovery platform called Yuna. Her fiancé, Michael Polansky, co-founded the company in 2020 alongside chief scientist Kyung-Jin Jang, chief technology officer Chris Hinojosa, and chief business officer Stanley King. Polansky serves as CEO. Gaga holds a board seat, not a co-founder title.
Celebrity-backed startups typically follow a predictable playbook. Adele invested in royalty-tracking firm Audoo. Selena Gomez founded mental health startup Wondermind. Meanwhile, AI shopping app Phia built its entire Series A announcement around the 30 A-list investors behind its $35.5 million round. The names functioned as marketing.
Outer Bio rejected that model. No consumer product exists. No retail launch looms. Polansky told TechCrunch the company stayed quiet for years, even from close friends.
The core technology solves a stubborn problem. Skin removed from the body dies within about a week. Outer Bio’s proprietary system keeps nutrients flowing in and waste flowing out, extending viability to roughly four weeks while preserving molecular structure. Researchers can now induce ultraviolet damage in living tissue and watch the stress response unfold over weeks, not days.
A machine-learning layer sits on top. The company claims it computationally screens around 750 million compounds annually, narrowing candidates for testing against living tissue. Results feed back into the model, sharpening predictions. Polansky says the loop now generates a new candidate every six weeks, up from a couple leads every eighteen months under manual literature mining.
Outer Bio pursues cosmetic ingredients, not drugs, which means skipping FDA approval. Safety testing still applies under OECD guidelines. Four of six current leads move through that process now. The company generates revenue through research collaborations, including one with a pharmaceutical partner studying cancer drug rashes.
The company employs 19 people near Cambridge, Massachusetts. Backers include Wing Ventures, Initialized Capital, and Polansky’s firm Hawktail.
Gaga’s name brought attention. What keeps it remains uncertain. A Yuna preprint validated the tissue platform but stopped short of proving the AI discovery engine works. That gap separates a promising idea from a proven one.
