Precision Biotechnology and Predictive Models: Outer Bio's Bet on Skin Health
Outer Biosciences (commercially known as Outer Bio), the biotechnology startup co-founded by artist and businesswoman Lady Gaga along with her partner Michael Polansky, has publicly emerged from anonymity by announcing a $23 million funding round aimed at transforming medical and cosmetic skin research.
The Yuna Platform: Tissue Preservation and AI Analysis
After operating in secret since 2020 with a technical team of 19 specialists and scientific co-founders such as Kyung-Jin Jang, Chris Hinojosa and Stanley King, the company presented its technological core called Yuna:
- Live human skin outside the body: Yuna manages to keep full-thickness human skin samples alive and functional for four weeks. The tissue is obtained from donations of surplus material from surgical procedures that are usually discarded.
- Continuous learning computational models: The platform integrates artificial intelligence models to explore millions of chemical compounds per year. The system predicts which molecules can generate useful biological responses, evaluates the effects on Yuna's live samples, and feeds the algorithms back with the results obtained.
- Diverse biological sample: To date, the company works with samples from more than 300 donors, building a robust database on the variability of skin response.
Global Investors and Oncology Applications
The $23 million round was backed by institutional venture capital funds such as Wing Venture Capital, Initialized Capital, Sozo Ventures, Hawktail, Lightspeed, 3K, Liquid 2, and SV Angel.
Although the technology has a direct application for the development of ingredients for the beauty brand Haus Labs by Lady Gaga, Outer Bio's reach transcends the cosmetic sector by actively collaborating with the pharmaceutical industry. In the health tech field, the startup investigates and measures severe skin reactions and toxicities caused by various oncological treatments, allowing dermatological therapies to be evaluated without directly exposing patients.
At next+ we believe that the emergence of Outer Bio marks a turning point at the intersection of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and dermatological health. The ability to preserve complex live human tissue for a month solves one of the biggest bottlenecks in medical research: the gap between traditional in vitro models and actual clinical trials. By feeding generative chemistry algorithms with biological responses from live human skin, the company not only eliminates the dependence on testing in animal models or simplified synthetic cultures, but also exponentially accelerates the discovery of treatments for skin conditions and side effects of complex pharmacological therapies, consolidating a new standard of precision for future aesthetic and regenerative medicine.