Lady Gaga's Fiancé Michael Polansky Is Building an AI-Driven Skincare Startup — With Her on the Board

Lady Gaga sits on the board of a biotech startup co-founded by her fiancé, Michael Polansky, that uses artificial intelligence and living human skin to discover new cosmetic ingredients.

The company, Outer Biosciences, was co-founded by Polansky in 2022 and began speaking publicly about its work on 21 August 2026, when Polansky published a company announcement titled "Why we are building Outer Bio" on the startup's website and gave an interview to TechCrunch. Billboard confirmed Lady Gaga's board role and Polansky's co-founding position on 25 August 2026.

Outer Biosciences has built a platform called Yuna — an ex vivo, or outside-the-body, system that keeps full-thickness human skin alive for up to four weeks. The company says 30-day-old tissue on the platform can look almost identical to day-one tissue. According to Billboard and TechCrunch, the skin is ethically sourced from tissue that would normally be discarded after surgery, mostly plastic surgery, and samples are de-identified to protect donor privacy.

The process works in two steps. An AI model predicts which untested chemicals might have a beneficial effect on a specific skin function. Outer Biosciences then validates those predictions using its living-tissue system. Researchers can also induce UVB damage — the type of ultraviolet radiation responsible for sunburn — in the living tissue and track the resulting stress, inflammatory and recovery responses, according to TechCrunch.

Outer Biosciences is targeting cosmetic ingredients rather than pharmaceutical drugs, a deliberate choice that avoids the FDA approval process, which can be lengthy and expensive. The company plans to partner with a licensee to bring products to market. Polansky told TechCrunch that four of the company's six current leads are likely to reach commercialization.

The startup has raised $23 million in funding to date and already generates revenue through collaborative research partnerships. One such collaboration is studying why certain cancer drugs cause severe skin rashes.

What makes the company's approach unusual is the combination of machine learning with tissue that stays alive for weeks, rather than the synthetic or animal-based models more common in cosmetics research. The company describes itself on its website as a "Skin Bioactives Discovery Platform Using Human Skin Models," pairing machine learning with full-thickness human skin to discover skin mechanisms and actives — the ingredients that produce a measurable effect on skin.

For Lady Gaga, the board role adds a business dimension outside the music industry, though one that sits adjacent to the beauty and cosmetics world she has operated in through her Haus Labs brand. For Polansky, Outer Biosciences represents a step into the biotech sector with a company that has already attracted both funding and research partners.