Michael Polansky has broken years of silence about the AI and biology startup he co-founded with Lady Gaga’s involvement.
Polansky, 46, who is engaged to Stefani Germanotta — the Grammy winner known professionally as Lady Gaga, 38 — co-founded Outer Biosciences in 2022 alongside chief scientist Kyung-Jin Jang, CTO Chris Hinojosa and chief business officer Stanley King. The company employs 19 people and has raised roughly $23 million, yet Polansky says he barely discussed its work with even his close friends until now.
Outer Biosciences has developed technology that can keep real human skin tissue alive outside the body for as long as a month while using it to gather data capable of training an AI model. The tissue largely comes from material that would otherwise be discarded following surgery, particularly plastic surgery. According to Polansky, it is sourced through vetted non-profit and commercial organisations under institutional review board oversight and documented donor consent, with samples arriving at the company already de-identified.
The team has created a support system which supplies the tissue with nutrients and removes metabolic waste. Ordinarily, tissue used for research remains viable for just a short number of days. Outer Biosciences says its system gives researchers weeks to observe slower biological processes such as pigmentation changes, collagen remodelling and barrier repair. Researchers can even expose the skin to UVB radiation and follow its response over the subsequent weeks.
Polansky stressed that the researchers aren’t “healing” the tissue. Instead, they can observe an injury and study what happens biologically afterwards.
The company’s AI model works to predict which chemicals could potentially have a beneficial effect on a particular skin function. Researchers then test those candidates on living tissue before feeding the results back into the model, regardless of whether its prediction was correct. That feedback allows the system to improve its future predictions.
Polansky said the company initially took a “brute force” approach to finding useful compounds and produced only a couple of leads over around 18 months. With AI added to the process, he claims Outer Biosciences is now generating a new candidate approximately every six weeks. It currently has six active leads, with four appearing likely to reach commercialisation.
Rather than launching its own skincare range, the company plans to license or sell ingredients to beauty and pharmaceutical businesses that could eventually use them in products such as creams or serums.
Germanotta also has a role in the venture, sitting on Outer Biosciences’ board, and the two companies have collaborated on projects with her cosmetics company Haus Labs. Outer Biosciences’ chief scientist Kyung-Jin Jang sits on Haus Labs’ scientific advisory board.
After keeping the startup largely under wraps, Polansky said in a recent interview: “Trying to do this in private is hard.”
Explaining why the team is finally speaking publicly, he added: “We kind of want to start working in public now.”
That said, after years of secrecy, he appears ready for people to find out exactly what he’s been doing. Polansky said: “I think it’s going to be fun…to have people know that this is what we’ve been doing.”
In the viral moment that first brought Polansky into the public eye as Gaga’s partner, the couple met in late 2019 at a birthday party for Napster co-founder Sean Parker, where Gaga’s mother Cynthia Germanotta had urged Polansky to connect with her daughter. They went public with their relationship in 2020, confirmed their engagement in 2024, and have since collaborated on both personal and professional projects including co-writing her song “Disease” and her album “Mayhem.”
Polansky, who grew up in Minnesota and graduated from Harvard in 2006 with a degree in applied mathematics and computer science, previously spent years running Sean Parker’s family office and helping stand up the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, where he remains executive director.
Outer Biosciences is currently hiring for biology R&D and computational and data sciences positions at its Massachusetts location.