Outer Bio

Biotech · AI · Skincare

Funding

Outer Bio emerges from stealth with $23M to train AI on living skin

Skin explants normally die within days, which is why skincare has produced only one FDA-approved anti-aging ingredient in thirty years.

• Outer Bio emerged from stealth after four years in development, unveiling Yuna, a platform that keeps full-thickness human skin alive for four weeks, with roughly $23M raised to date and Wing Venture Capital leading its most recent investment.
• Founded by Michael Polansky, who previously ran Sean Parker's family office and helped establish the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Outer Bio calls itself a discovery company for skin bioactives, not a drug company.
• Yuna keeps full-thickness tissue, including epidermis, dermis and resident immune cells, alive via a 3D-printed porous support structure, using skin sourced from over 300 donors across Fitzpatrick skin types I through VI.
• Each compound-tissue pairing generates more than 30,000 data points, and the platform has amassed over 10 terabytes of data across 300+ donors and 10,000 treatments, screening against a library of 5.9 million compounds.
• Standard ex vivo skin dies within about a week, too short a window to observe collagen remodeling, chronic inflammation or cellular senescence, the processes that determine whether a skin treatment actually works.
• Outer Bio is steering toward cosmetic-ingredient discovery under OECD safety testing guidelines rather than drug approval, a route that also aligns with the EU's push to phase out animal testing in chemical safety assessment.
• By closing the loop between AI-proposed compounds and living-tissue experiments, Outer Bio is targeting a field that has produced only one new FDA-approved anti-aging mechanism, retinoids, in thirty years.