Lady Gaga's Partner Quietly Built AI Startup Using Living Human Skin

Michael Polansky sits at a sun-dappled table outside a Mill Valley bakery, speaking with the unhurried ease of someone accustomed to moving between worlds without fanfare. He is the CEO of Outer Biosciences, a startup that has spent years keeping human skin tissue alive outside the body—for up to thirty days now—to train artificial intelligence systems on how skin actually behaves. He is also the partner of Lady Gaga, the artist born Stefani Germanotta. The two lives coexist without apparent friction, though the first has remained almost entirely hidden until now.

Polansky grew up in Minnesota, studied applied mathematics and computer science at Harvard, and spent three years at Bridgewater Associates before a chance connection—his childhood neighbor happened to work for Sean Parker—led him to Silicon Valley in 2007. He became a principal at Founders Fund when Peter Thiel, Parker, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery ran it, then followed Parker into his family office, managing investments and philanthropic interests including the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. In late 2019, at one of Parker's birthday parties, he met Germanotta. Her mother had been trying to set them up for months. When he met Germanotta herself, he recalls, "it all made perfect sense." Their relationship is now fully integrated—she sits on Outer Biosciences' board, and he helps manage her cosmetics company, Haus Labs, which operates with roughly seventy employees out of El Segundo, California.

Outer Biosciences itself began in 2022, born from a decade Polansky spent alongside Parker in cancer immunotherapy—a field that was "very fringe" when they entered it. The core problem the company addresses is simple: the pace of innovation in biology and chemistry has never matched software, largely because there is no ethical way to test compounds directly on living people. Scientists rely instead on animal models, simplified cell cultures, and lab-grown organoids, all of which are poor proxies for how actual human tissue behaves. Outer Biosciences took a different path. The company sources human skin that would otherwise be discarded after surgery—mostly cosmetic procedures—through vetted nonprofit and commercial biobanks operating under institutional review board oversight and documented donor consent, principally the National Disease Research Interchange and the Cooperative Human Tissue Network. The tissue arrives de-identified, stripped of names and contact information by the supplying organizations before it ever reaches the company.

Once in hand, a proprietary support system developed by Polansky's team feeds the tissue nutrients and removes metabolic waste, extending its viable life far beyond the industry standard of a few days. That standard is enough to test for acute toxicity but not for slower biological processes—collagen remodeling, pigmentation change, barrier repair—that unfold over weeks. Outer Biosciences' system keeps tissue alive for thirty days while preserving what Polansky calls its "day-zero architecture," meaning thirty-day-old tissue looks substantially like tissue on its first day, though not perfectly identical. The difference matters enormously. Researchers can induce UVB damage in living tissue and then track the stress, inflammatory, and recovery responses that follow over subsequent weeks—watching an injury happen and observing the biology that unfolds in its wake, rather than simply healing it.

The real innovation, though, lies in how the pieces fit together. An AI model predicts which untested chemicals are likely to benefit specific skin functions. Those chemicals are run through the living-tissue system. The results—whether the prediction was correct or not—feed back into the model, improving the next round of guesses. Early on, the company relied on a "brute force" approach, mining scientific literature and partnering with the National Cancer Institute on natural compounds from extreme environments. That phase produced a couple of leads over eighteen months. With AI layered in, the company now generates a new candidate roughly every six weeks. Six leads are currently active in its pipeline, with several dozen additional "hits" logged. The scale of this acceleration becomes clear when Polansky notes the total universe of skin-active ingredients: the FDA maintains rules covering thirteen categories of over-the-counter skin drugs, across which only about 120 to 130 active ingredients are approved. Add cosmetic ingredients backed by actual research, and the number reaches closer to two hundred. The opportunity is vast.

Outer Biosciences is discovering cosmetic ingredients, not drugs, so FDA approval is not required. Instead, the path runs through two steps: securing a standardized industry name for the ingredient, then safety testing under guidelines set by the OECD, a Paris-based international body whose member countries accept each other's properly conducted studies. Rather than build its own consumer brand, Outer Biosciences plans to license or sell finished ingredients to beauty or pharmaceutical companies that will formulate them into actual products and bring them to market under their own names. Four of the company's six current leads look likely to reach commercialization. In the meantime, the company generates revenue from collaborative research partnerships, including work with a pharmaceutical partner studying why certain cancer drugs cause severe skin rashes and with consumer beauty brands testing whether Outer Biosciences' data holds up against their own product-development needs.

The company has raised roughly twenty-three million dollars to date, with early backers including Calm Capital, Brighter Capital, and Polansky's own investing firm, Hawktail. It employs nineteen people, with all but Polansky based just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. Polansky declined to say whether he is currently raising additional capital. When asked why he chose now to speak publicly about the company after years of near-total silence—he barely discussed it even with close friends—he pointed to the data his team is beginning to amass and the confidence that has given them. "Trying to do this in private is hard," he said as the bakery staff began flipping chairs onto tables. "We kind of want to start working in public now." Outer Biosciences is not alone in pursuing this idea, though its use of real tissue rather than synthetic alternatives is distinctive. Vivodyne, a Philadelphia-based competitor building lab-grown human organ tissue paired with predictive AI, announced this month that it has raised close to eighty million dollars to date. But Polansky seems less preoccupied with rivals than simply focused on the work itself. Unlike AI companies training on scraped internet data, there is no "biology internet" to scrape. The data Outer Biosciences generates doesn't exist anywhere else, making the company's position more defensible, if slower to build than traditional software-based AI startups. It is also cheaper to run, with modest compute demands compared with training a large language model. All of the company's AI work currently runs on-premise, not in the cloud, because, as Polansky says, "we don't want the data in the cloud."