Business22 September, 20263 min read
Andreessen Horowitz Launches Horowitz Andreessen Academy In San Francisco For Post-High School Builders
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San Francisco-based Horowitz Andreessen Academy launches as a private, for-profit, unaccredited school. Free one-year program with projects and work experiences; potential two-year, tuition-based expansion, with industry partners.
A16z builds a school
Andreessen Horowitz launched The Horowitz Andreessen Academy as a private, full-time, in-person school in San Francisco for young people coming out of high school, and the academy said it would replace exams with projects, intensive courses, and work experiences.
“The Academy is putting $42 million from a16z and a group of individual investors into the one-year San Francisco-based program.”
Gagan Biyani, who Fortune said was running the new Horowitz Andreessen Academy, told Fortune that “The bet is that there’s an opportunity to educate the next generation in a way that is more future-forward, and that’s a big market opportunity,” as the program positions itself as a business opportunity in higher education.
The Academy is a separate for-profit company from the VC firm, and the school is not accredited, will award no degree, will not take federal student aid, and does not guarantee a job or a paid internship.
Fortune said the founding class will be about 50 students starting Sept. 2027, and it said the one-year program is tuition-free while each student receives $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 travel budget.
The academy’s pitch also centers on projects and work, with The Verge saying students will be promised more than $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 travel and research budget while the program trades “degrees and homework for stints at tech companies.”
Partners and the curriculum
The academy’s structure combines “Pursuits, Courses, and Co-ops,” and Andreessen Horowitz described co-ops as work opportunities during the year, including rotation programs across roles and companies. The Horowitz Andreessen Academy will open in San Francisco as a free one-year program and listed the initial founding partners as Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The academy is currently not an accredited school, so participants will not earn a degree or college credits that transfer elsewhere, while the school is accepting applications for its first year.
The academy intends to seek regulatory approval for a two-year program starting in 2028, and Biyani expects “to charge something similar to elite private universities”—in the range of $60,000 to $90,000 a year. The Verge said the academy will launch with 10 partners and $42 million in funding led by a16z, while it also described the program as offering “no traditional grades, tests, or homework,” and instead having students work and explore alongside short classes and co-ops.
Skepticism and what’s at stake
Bryan Caplan, the economist at George Mason University, said the approach could work for “the first 50 students,” but he argued that “something that can work for 50 handpicked people isn’t going to work even for the top 5,000.” Caplan said skipping college generally signals that “you’re a weird person, and people are understandably nervous about hiring weird people,” framing the academy’s selection as a prestige offset rather than a universal solution. The academy is open to high school graduates, even if they are younger than 18, and its CEO Gagan Biyani described the planned 2028 tuition as “similar in cost to an elite private university.”
“The first class will include about 50 students and start in September 2027.”
The Verge said students must move to San Francisco and arrange their own housing to partake in the one-year program, and it said the academy will only accept 50 students. Gizmodo reported that the academy is a private, full-time, for-profit school based in San Francisco, and it said the first class will start in September 2027 with about 50 students while the academy eventually plans to launch a two-year program in 2028 pending regulatory approval.