What to know about Horowitz Andreessen Academy, Silicon Valley's $42 million AI-era college alternative

Silicon Valley has long celebrated the college dropout. Now some of its biggest names are backing an educational institution of their own.

The Horowitz Andreessen Academy has raised $42 million and recruited prominent tech figures as instructors, guest speakers, and mentors.

Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, better known as A16z, is backing the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a new for-profit school for young people interested in building companies, products, and emerging technologies.

Its network includes executives and founders from OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Stripe.

The San Francisco academy will trade degrees, traditional grades, and lecture-heavy coursework for independent projects, short classes, and work placements at technology companies.

Its tuition-free founding class is due to arrive in 2027, but the school's longer-term plan is to charge fees comparable to an elite private university.

The academy is a full-time, in-person, for-profit educational program in San Francisco aimed primarily at recent high-school graduates.

Its first offering, the Founding Class Fellowship, is a one-year program scheduled to begin in September 2027 with about 50 students. The academy won't initially award degrees or grant college credit and isn't accredited, making it a college alternative rather than a university.

The program is organized around courses, co-ops, or structured work placements at participating technology companies, and "pursuits," its term for self-directed projects. Students will spend September through April at the San Francisco campus, travel abroad in May, and complete co-ops from June through August, according to the academy's website.

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