a16z Launches Horowitz Andreessen Academy, A New School
Quick Reads
- Andreessen Horowitz has launched the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a private, project-based school in San Francisco for ambitious high school graduates, backed by $42 million in funding.
- The Academy is unaccredited, awards no degree, and skips traditional grades and tests in favor of student-led building, internships, and mentorship from 10 Founding Partners including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
- The Founding Class of roughly 50 students starts a tuition-free, one-year fellowship in fall 2027, with a paid two-year program planned for 2028.
Andreessen Horowitz has launched a private school. On Tuesday, 22nd 2026, the venture capital firm unveiled the Horowitz Andreessen Academy (HAA), a full-time, in-person program in San Francisco built to replace college for a small group of ambitious high school graduates.
The announcement, written by a16z general partner Erik Torenberg, frames the project around what he calls an “age of infinite doing,” arguing that AI changed what it means to be educated.
The Academy is led by Gagan Biyani, who previously co-founded Udemy and the online learning platform Maven. Marc Andreessen and Erik Torenberg will join Biyani on HAA’s board.
$42 Million In Funding, A Separate For-Profit Company
HAA has raised $42 million, with a16z contributing $35 million of that total. The remaining capital came from individual investors including Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, former OpenAI Applications CEO Fidji Simo, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, Alpha School’s Joe Liemandt, and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar.
HAA is a standalone, for-profit company rather than a division of a16z, a structure Biyani has said forces the school to answer directly to students and families.
No Grades, No Degree, No Federal Aid
HAA is unaccredited and will not award a degree, accept federal student aid, or guarantee a job or paid internship. There are no traditional grades, tests, or homework. The Founding Class will admit around 50 students for a one-year, tuition-free fellowship starting fall 2027.
Each student receives $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 travel budget, though they cover their own housing in the Bay Area. A paid, two-year follow-on program is planned for 2028, pending regulatory approval, with tuition comparable to an elite private university.
Three Pillars: Co-ops, Courses, and Pursuits
According to the a16z announcement, student life at HAA runs on three tracks. Co-ops let students work year-round, not just over the summer, rotating across roles at founding and hiring partners to figure out what they like.
Courses are taught by, in Torenberg’s words, people who “founded unicorn companies,” the investors who backed them, and in some cases the authors of the textbooks the industry now studies from; sample courses include Frontier Systems, Origins and Innovations in Digital Computing 1940-2025, The Craft of Selling, The Modern Software Developer, and AI Inference Engineering.
Pursuits are self-directed projects, startup ideas, or “rabbit holes” students chase in their own time, sometimes including a few weeks working from another country.
Guest lecturers expected to include Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Travis Kalanick, Mira Murati, Ali Ghodsi, and Patrick Collison, among other tech leaders.
Ten Founding Partners, A Built-In Hiring Network
Ten Founding Partners ; Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe back the school, alongside more than 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors.
The a16z post argues that college’s most underrated function isn’t the classroom but the density of peers it puts within reach, and that today’s most talented high schoolers risk losing that network effect if they skip college for online communities alone.
HAA’s answer is to recreate that density in person, centered on San Francisco specifically, a city Torenberg describes as unusually open to cold emails, walk-ins, and hustlers regardless of age or credentials.
