Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm better known for backing technology startups, has opened a school of its own. The Horowitz Andreessen Academy began in San Francisco on 22 September 2026: about fifty students, one year, no tuition. What makes it more than a curiosity is the plan behind the free year. The academy is a for-profit company that intends to open a two-year program in 2028 priced in the range of an elite private university, and the outside economists who have looked at the model doubt it can serve anyone beyond a handpicked fifty.
A school run by an investment firm
The academy launched as an in-person, full-time program in San Francisco, incubated by Andreessen Horowitz and run as a company separate from the firm but closely tied to it. Its founder and chief executive is Gagan Biyani, who previously co-founded the online course marketplace Udemy. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, and the investor Erik Torenberg sit on its board.
It is built for a specific student. The academy says it will mainly serve high school graduates who would otherwise start a four-year degree, with priority for graduating seniors, and that it also considers transfer students and international applicants. Most students, it says, will arrive straight from high school or after a year or two at another university. That is a narrower group than young people in general: the program is aimed at those already inclined to skip or shorten the conventional route.
Teaching comes from people who hold operating jobs in technology rather than from a standing faculty. The academy lists Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, the AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, Figma chief executive Dylan Field, the investor Naval Ravikant and the former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky among its instructors and guest lecturers. Ten companies are founding partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit and Stripe. Each student also receives more than $50,000 in credits for computing power and technology resources from those partners, plus a $5,000 travel budget.
Erik Torenberg, the a16z general partner joining the board, said in the announcement that ambitious young people are not waiting for permission to work on today's most pressing problems, and that they should move to San Francisco. "This isn't just an investment idea for us. It's an investment in the future of the country," said Ben Horowitz, the firm's co-founder, in the launch announcement.
The year has a shape. Fortune, which interviewed the academy's leadership, describes three parts: September through April on campus in San Francisco, May travelling abroad, and June through August in a co-op placement at a partner company. There are no traditional grades, tests or homework; students spend the year on projects of their own.
Admission by what you have already built
Entry turns on what the academy calls proof of work: what an applicant has built, shipped or earned, rather than entirely on grades, essays and test scores. For a seventeen-year-old, that means a working website, a small business or a piece of hardware people actually use counts for more than a transcript.
"The most ambitious young people today are building companies from their parents' living rooms, launching websites that reach millions of people, and building robotic arms before they turn 18," said Gagan Biyani, the academy's chief executive, in the launch announcement. "In the AI era, it's more important to come out with a portfolio of projects that you worked on and work experience than it is to have a diploma or certificate," Biyani told the San Francisco Chronicle.
"The AI revolution is going to be as transformational to jobs as the Industrial Revolution was to the agricultural society that came before it," said Ben Horowitz, the firm's co-founder, in the launch announcement. He added that training built for the Industrial Revolution will not map perfectly onto this one. Biyani has also been careful to say the academy is not for everyone. "College is still the right path for most students," said Biyani in the launch announcement.
No degree, and no federal money
Fortune reports that the academy is unaccredited, awards no degree, takes no federal student aid and does not guarantee a job or a paid placement. The launch announcement does not discuss accreditation. It says instead that the academy intends to seek regulatory approvals for a two-year program targeting Fall 2028, the step that would carry it past the fellowship stage.
For the fifty students, the year costs no tuition, and Fortune reports it promises no job or paid placement at the end.
The $42 million behind it
The academy raised $42 million from a16z and a group of individual investors, according to the launch announcement, whose list of backers includes Adam D'Angelo, a co-founder of Quora, the Shopify chief executive Tobi Lutke, the DoorDash chief executive Tony Xu, Garry Tan of Y Combinator and Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer of Palantir. Wilson Sonsini, the law firm that advised on the round, states the same figure.
The company is explicit that this is a business. A San Francisco Standard account of the launch says the academy plans to open a paid, two-year program in fall 2028, pending regulatory approval, and the academy's own release says tuition for that program is expected to be similar to that of elite private universities. No figure appears in the release. Fortune reported the range the academy expects as $60,000 to $90,000 a year. "We will see over time how students will finance this," Biyani told Fortune.
Why outsiders doubt the model travels
"Something that can work for 50 handpicked people isn't going to work even for the top 5,000," said Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University. He added that MIT will last for centuries. "It's a bootcamp with a plan to be a college, but I'd say not a realistic plan to be a college," said Ryan Craig, a managing director at Achieve Partners, who added that it is hard to compete with free money from the government. Caplan also told Fortune: "you're a weird person, and people are understandably nervous about hiring weird people."
The two sides disagree about selection more than about teaching. The academy's claim is that a portfolio of finished work will matter more to employers as AI reshapes entry-level jobs, and that the way to find out is to run the program. The economists' objection is that admitting people who have already built something is what makes the result hard to extend to anyone else.
What happens next
Applications for the founding class are open, and that class begins in Fall 2027. The two-year program the academy wants to charge for needs regulatory approval and is targeted at Fall 2028; neither the approval nor a tuition figure exists yet. Until both arrive, the free year stands alone: fifty students, no degree, and a college that has not been approved or priced.