Andreessen Horowitz Backs $42 Million School With No Grades

Andreessen Horowitz has committed $35 million to a for-profit San Francisco school with no grades, no tests, and no degrees, betting that the next generation of tech entrepreneurs may be better off skipping college to start companies instead.

The venture capital firm, also known as a16z, announced the Horowitz Andreessen Academy on Tuesday. The school targets primarily recent high school graduates who want to build a business or pursue careers in technology.

The for-profit venture has raised a total of $42 million and plans to welcome its first class of roughly 50 students in September 2027.

The curriculum discards the traditional academic apparatus. There will be no homework assignments, no tests, and no grades. Students will take short courses with titles like "AI Research and Models" and "The Geometry of Luck" and gain firsthand experience inside local tech companies.

Most of their time will go toward developing startup ideas and working on independent projects. They will draw on a network of more than 200 mentors and guest speakers, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

"The big difference between going to the academy and going to college is we are not gonna prioritize your grades," academy CEO Gagan Biyani told Forbes. "We're gonna prioritize proof of work." Biyani previously co-founded the online-learning company Udemy.

The academy's mission stems in part from Andreessen Horowitz's view that conventional education does not prepare young people for a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. It is a position that aligns the firm's investing thesis — heavy on AI — with its education bet.

"The training that worked for the Industrial Revolution isn't going to map perfectly onto the AI revolution, so somebody has to pioneer how you train a person for this new world," Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz's co-founder and general partner, said in a statement.

The school represents one of the most direct attempts yet by a major venture firm to build a pipeline into entrepreneurship outside the university system. If the model works, a16z will hold a position at the very start of the founder lifecycle — identifying and shaping talent years before those founders raise their first institutional round.