a16z Raises $42 Million for Anti-College Academy in San Francisco

Andreessen Horowitz has raised $42 million to launch a full-time, in-person academy in San Francisco that aims to compete directly with elite universities for the country's most ambitious 18-to-22-year-olds.

Launched on Sept. 22, the Horowitz Andreessen Academy — known simply as the Academy — is an unaccredited private school for recent high school graduates who want to start their own ventures and build new technologies, according to the school's site and a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The funding round was led by a16z, with additional backing from C-suite executives at Shopify, DoorDash, Palantir, and Alpha School.

Applications are already open for the founding class. The first year's tuition will be free. After that, the Academy will charge for the two-year program at a price "similar in cost to an elite private university," Academy CEO Gagan Biyani said in a post on X.

That pricing puts the school in direct competition with institutions charging $60,000-plus annually — but with a fundamentally different product.

A curriculum built for founders

The Academy claims two structural advantages over traditional higher education: student-led projects and corporate connections. Its founding partners include Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe — a roster that reads like a map of the current AI and defense-tech landscape.

The teaching staff and mentor list carries similar weight. Sam Altman, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, and former OpenAI executive Mira Murati are among the high-profile industry leaders attached to the school.

In an X article, a16z general partner Erik Torenberg laid out the program's three central elements: co-ops at Silicon Valley companies, courses taught by experts, and "pursuits" — personal projects led by students themselves.

The course catalog is hyperspecific to the tech innovation world. Offerings include "Origins and Innovations in Digital Computing 1940-2025" and "The Craft of Selling."

San Francisco as a recruiting pitch

The school's location appears to be part of the pedagogy. Torenberg framed the city itself as an asset in his post.

"The city loves hustlers and rule breakers. And the leaders at the highest level of the tech industry show up every day at every day events," Torenberg wrote. "In what other place or what other industry, would you be able to walk up to the equivalents of Jamie Dimon or David Solomon at an event and have a great conversation?"

The pitch is a deliberate inversion of the dropout mythology that has shadowed Silicon Valley for decades. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs famously left college; Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman followed. The Academy's bet is that the network, the credential, and the technical training can now come packaged without the university — from the start.

How to get in

Applicants must submit high school transcripts, test scores, a short video, and a portfolio. Accepted students will begin classes in Sept. 2027. Like traditional college admissions, the program offers an early decision track with a Nov. 5 deadline.

The requirement of transcripts and test scores signals the Academy is not courting students who lack academic standing — it is courting students whom Stanford or MIT would also admit, and offering them a founder track instead. With free tuition for the founding class and a16z's network behind it, the school poses an early but credible challenge to universities that have long treated top technical talent as their exclusive pipeline.