Michael Polansky is training an AI model on skin that’s still alive

Michael Polansky carries an unassuming air that feels entirely out of place in the high-stakes, ego-driven corridors of Silicon Valley. Sitting on a sun-drenched patio at a bakery in Mill Valley, California, the bespectacled entrepreneur—whose dark hair is beginning to show hints of silver—projects the calm, intellectual demeanor of a university professor.

Yet, Polansky leads a double life that is as fascinating as it is unconventional. To the public, he is recognized as the creative and romantic partner of global superstar Lady Gaga (Stefani Germanotta). To the scientific and venture capital communities, however, he is the co-founder of Outer Biosciences, a stealthy AI-driven startup that has spent years perfecting a method to keep human skin tissue alive outside the body for weeks at a time.

A Quiet Pivot to Biotechnology

Polansky’s professional trajectory is a study in calculated evolution. A Harvard graduate with a background in applied mathematics and computer science, he spent his early career at the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. While he found the work intellectually rigorous, it lacked the spark of daily inspiration.

His path shifted toward the West Coast after a chance connection with Sean Parker, the former Facebook president and Napster co-founder. After moving to San Francisco, Polansky became a principal at Founders Fund, working alongside industry titans like Peter Thiel and Parker. When Parker eventually transitioned to managing his own family office, Polansky stepped up to lead it, overseeing a vast portfolio of business, investment, and philanthropic ventures—most notably the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for a broader shift in his life, influenced heavily by his relationship with Germanotta. The two met in 2019, introduced by her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, who had grown close to Polansky through their shared philanthropic efforts. Today, their partnership extends into the professional realm, with Polansky playing a key role in managing the logistics of Germanotta’s massive world tours and supporting her cosmetics brand, Haus Labs.

The Genesis of Outer Biosciences

Polansky is not a scientist by trade, but his decade-long immersion in the world of cancer immunotherapy provided him with a front-row seat to the limitations of modern biological research. He co-founded Outer Biosciences in 2022 alongside Kyung-Jin Jang, Chris Hinojosa, and Stanley King.

The company was born from a fundamental frustration: the pace of innovation in biology and chemistry is perpetually throttled by the inability to conduct ethical, real-time experiments on human subjects. Traditional proxies—such as animal models or simplified cell cultures—often fail to capture the complex, nuanced reality of human organ function.

"The startup’s value isn’t any one piece of what it’s doing but how the pieces fit together: human tissue that can be kept alive for weeks, a diverse donor pool that Outer Biosciences’ team can subject to controlled experimental conditions, and repeated molecular measurements taken along the way."

How the Technology Works

Outer Biosciences bypasses the limitations of synthetic organoids by sourcing actual human skin tissue that would otherwise be discarded following plastic surgery. The company operates under strict ethical guidelines, utilizing vetted nonprofit and commercial biobanks—such as the National Disease Research Interchange—to acquire samples.

• Ethical Sourcing: All tissue is obtained through documented donor consent and arrives at the lab already de-identified, ensuring complete privacy.
• Longevity: Through a proprietary support system, the team provides nutrients and removes metabolic waste, allowing the skin to remain viable for up to a month.
• Preservation: The tissue retains its "day-zero" architecture, including epidermal and stromal molecular programs, allowing researchers to observe biological processes that occur over weeks, such as collagen remodeling and pigmentation shifts.

The AI-Biology Feedback Loop

The true innovation at Outer Biosciences lies in how it integrates this living tissue with machine learning. The company has moved beyond "brute force" research methods to a sophisticated, self-enforcing AI system.

1. Prediction: The AI model identifies untested chemical compounds that are statistically likely to benefit specific skin functions. 2. Validation: These compounds are applied to the living tissue samples. 3. Refinement: The results—whether successful or not—are fed back into the AI, which uses the data to improve the accuracy of its next round of predictions.

This cycle has revolutionized the company’s output. While early efforts yielded only a few leads over 18 months, the current AI-integrated pipeline generates a new candidate roughly every six weeks. Currently, the company has six active leads in its pipeline, with dozens of additional "hits" logged.

A New Model for Commercialization

Outer Biosciences is not looking to build a consumer-facing skincare brand. Instead, it is positioning itself as a discovery engine for the beauty and pharmaceutical industries. By identifying and validating new cosmetic ingredients, the company plans to license its findings to larger firms that handle the formulation, manufacturing, and marketing of final products.

The business model is already gaining traction:

• Pharmaceutical Partnerships: The company is working with pharma partners to investigate why certain cancer treatments trigger severe skin rashes.
• Beauty Industry Collaboration: Major consumer brands are currently testing Outer Biosciences’ data to validate their own product development pipelines.
• Financial Backing: To date, the company has raised approximately $23 million from investors including Wing Ventures, Initialized, and Polansky’s own firm, Hawktail.

Why Now?

After years of operating in near-total silence, Polansky feels the time is right to bring Outer Biosciences into the light. The decision to go public is driven by the sheer volume of data the team has amassed and the growing confidence in their predictive capabilities.

"Trying to do this in private is hard," Polansky admits. "We kind of want to start working in public now."

While competitors like Vivodyne are also making strides in lab-grown human tissue, Polansky remains focused on his own path. He notes that the company’s data is unique and defensible, and its operations are surprisingly efficient. Notably, all AI training is conducted on-premise rather than in the cloud, a decision made to ensure total control over their proprietary biological data.

As the company looks to the future, the roadmap is clear: continue refining the predictive model to the point where the team can identify promising biological directions before ever needing to run a physical experiment. For Polansky, the transition from the private, high-pressure world of celebrity and finance to the methodical, data-driven world of skin biology is not just a career move—it is a mission to accelerate the pace of dermatological discovery.

"I think it’s going to be fun," Polansky says, "to have people know that this is what we’ve been doing."