a16z Puts $35 Million Into Its Own School for High School Graduates

Andreessen Horowitz has committed $35 million of a $42 million financing round to launch The Horowitz Andreessen Academy (HAA), a San Francisco school for roughly 50 high school graduates that starts in September 2027 and awards no degrees.

The firm behind early bets on Facebook, Instagram and Skype is moving its talent strategy to the earliest stage yet: the months right after high school. The first cohort studies full-time for one year in San Francisco, arranges its own housing, and pays no tuition. HAA lacks university accreditation, confers no degrees, and offers no transferable college credits.

The operating company behind HAA raised $42 million in total. Beyond a16z's $35 million, investors include Quora co-founder Adam D'Angelo, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.

What does admission require instead of grades?

Applicants still submit transcripts and test scores, but HAA weights "portfolio proof" — what candidates have already built — as a key criterion. The school's example applications include a candidate who built an AI book-indexing tool generating six figures in annual recurring revenue, and another whose AI dating coach product drew 1.7 million likes on social platforms.

The one-year program rests on three pillars: personal projects, courses, and enterprise practice. Personal projects, called "Pursuits," sit at the core. Students can run one or several at once, refining them with mentors.

HAA CEO Gagan Biyani, who co-founded Udemy and later Maven, said teaching is not the program's most important element. The school prefers to give students time and resources to advance their own goals, he said.

Announced courses span AI reasoning engineering, modern software development, the history of digital computing, and sales. Each student spends at least three months working full-time inside a company, plus three to four weeks of overseas independent research and travel.

Which companies are involved?

HAA has signed 10 founding partner enterprises:

• Anduril
• Anthropic
• Coinbase
• Google
• Meta
• NVIDIA
• OpenAI
• Palantir
• Replit
• Stripe

They do more than lend their logos. Partners participate in courses, provide computing power and hardware, and offer practice and Co-op opportunities. More than 40 additional companies have joined as recruitment partners.

A network of over 200 practitioners — teachers, mentors, guest speakers — includes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Thinking Machines Lab CEO Mira Murati, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, and World Labs co-founder Li Feifei. Not all will teach as full-time faculty.

Each first-cohort student receives more than $50,000 in computing credits and a $5,000 travel and research budget, resources they can put directly into their projects.

The school is explicit about limits: founding partners participate in different ways, not every company will take Co-op students, and recruitment partners reserve no definite positions. HAA guarantees no internships and no jobs.

How will the school make money?

The first cohort is free, but HAA is not a charity. After securing regulatory approval, the school plans to launch a two-year program in 2028 and expand enrollment. Biyani said annual tuition is expected to reach $60,000 to $90,000 by then — a range comparable to top U.S. private universities.

Biyani sizes higher education as a roughly $2 trillion market and said the team wants both to explore new education methods and to build HAA into a successful business.

a16z sits inside the governance, not just the cap table. Co-founder Marc Andreessen and General Partner Erik Torenberg hold board seats.

Is this a dealflow play?

Torenberg has said that "venture capital is about discovering and cultivating talents," and stated he believes a16z will invest in entrepreneurs who come out of HAA in the future. The school gives the firm a channel to reach young people interested in entrepreneurship, technology and research before they enter university or the workforce.

The model has precedents. Peter Thiel launched the Thiel Fellowship in 2011, offering $250,000 over two years to people aged 22 and under who leave school to pursue ventures. Y Combinator invests $500,000 in each early-stage startup it selects. Alpha School applies AI-driven personalized teaching to free time for entrepreneurship training, and Forge Prep, which opened its first campus in 2026, centers its curriculum on real projects.

HAA stacks a new layer on top: a major venture firm directly founding a school, run by education entrepreneurs, wired into tech companies and investment networks simultaneously. If the 2028 paid program launches at the projected tuition, a16z will have a revenue-generating education business and a pipeline of founders it can back — starting the search years earlier than any traditional fund structure allows.