Outer Bio exits stealth with $23M and Yuna, a platform keeping human skin alive for four weeks
What's the deal? Outer BioDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → emerged from stealth on August 21, launching Yuna, a platform that keeps donated human skin alive and measurable outside the body for four weeks. The Massachusetts startup, legally named Outer Biosciences, has raised $23 million and screens roughly 750 million compounds a year using AI. It was co-founded in 2020 by chief executive Michael Polansky alongside chief scientist Kyung-Jin Jang, chief technology officer Chris Hinojosa, and chief business officer Stanley King.
What's the endgame? Skin removed from the body usually dies within about a week, yet processes like collagen remodelling, chronic inflammation, and cellular senescence unfold over weeks. Yuna extends viability to four weeks while preserving the tissue's native architecture and immune function, giving Outer Bio high-fidelity human data to feed its machine-learning discovery of new skin bioactives.
The tissue comes from surgically discarded material sourced through biobanks under institutional review board oversight, spanning donors across ages, sexes, and Fitzpatrick skin types I through VI. Each compound-sample pair generates more than 30,000 data points; to date the platform has produced over 10 terabytes of data across more than 300 donors and 10,000 treatments.
Why now? The skincare industry generates more than $100 billion a year, yet in three decades it has added essentially one FDA-approved topical mechanism that meaningfully improves visible skin ageing: retinoids. Polansky frames the bottleneck as technical, not commercial.
"Skincare has never lacked demand or ambition. It has lacked the ability to study compounds and mechanisms in living human skin over a biologically relevant timeframe," Polansky said. He argues rival models built on reconstructed skin or cell monolayers "can tell you whether a compound is toxic; they can't tell you whether it works."
The company pairs machine learning with every experiment: models prioritise which compounds to test, and each result sharpens the next round of predictions. Polansky says the loop now yields a new candidate roughly every six weeks, up from a couple of leads every 18 months under manual literature mining. Its virtual screening library spans 5.9 million compounds across 11 databases.
What could go wrong? Outer Bio chases cosmetic ingredients rather than drugs, skipping FDA approval. But candidates still need a standardised industry name and clearance under Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development guidelines before reaching the market.
The company also carries an unusual profile: Stefani Germanotta, better known as Lady Gaga and Polansky's partner, sits on the board and unveiled the company in an Instagram post. Her cosmetics brand, Haus LabsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, collaborates with Outer Bio at the margins.
The signal: Outer Bio joins a wave of musicians moving from co-signs to cap tables, but this one is science-first — no consumer product, kept quiet for years. Its bet is that AI for biology is bottlenecked less by intelligence than by clinically valid data that, as Polansky puts it, "has to be grown, not computed."
Read more: outerbio.com, TechCrunch, Tech Funding News
Image credit: National Institutes of Health (NIH)
