a16z Opens AI School With 50 Places, $50,000 in Compute Credits — and Admission by Actual Work
Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, an alternative to college: the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a private school in San Francisco for recent high school graduates and students at four-year universities who want to build technology in the AI era. Applications for the tuition-free "Founding Class Fellowship" — one year, in person, roughly 50 places, starting Fall 2027 — opened the same day as the announcement.
What sets the school apart from a traditional degree program is not just that it is free. It has no grades, no tests, and no homework, and it is not accredited as of today — students receive neither a degree nor transferable credits, according to TechCrunch, cited by Quartz via Yahoo Finance. And a16z treats it as a commercial project, not a charitable one, writes Cryptobriefing.
What the Program Actually Is
The Academy is a private, full-time, in-person program in San Francisco. The first cohort — the Founding Class Fellowship — will admit roughly 50 students starting in Fall 2027, targeting young people who would otherwise begin college, according to Quartz via Yahoo Finance. Applications opened September 22, 2026, the same day as the announcement.
Admission follows a "proof of work" principle: what the applicant has actually built, launched, or made money from, according to the school's own website. CEO Gagan Biyani has described the admissions process as a combination of portfolio, interviews, and IQ testing, according to News18, which quotes him via the Sourcery newsletter. Biyani has summarized the philosophy this way: "The big difference between going to the academy and going to college is that we're not going to prioritize your grades. We're going to prioritize proof of work."
No Grades, Three Building Blocks
The school's own announcement letter, reproduced by Hoodline, promises a break with the traditional classroom. Instead of grades, tests, and homework, the curriculum is organized around three components: co-ops (internships), courses, and pursuits (students' own projects), with pursuits described as the school's core academic unit. Biyani says 75 to 80 percent of students' time goes toward working on projects or building out their own ideas, according to News18.
The courses are short and intensive — from two days to four weeks — and are often taught by founders and operators from the tech industry rather than career academics, according to the school's own announcement, reproduced by Hoodline. Among the announced courses are "Frontier Systems," "AI Inference Engineering," "the modern software developer," and "the history of digital computing," according to a report republished by MSN.
$50,000 in Compute Credits
Fellows in the Founding Class receive more than $50,000 in compute credits and a $5,000 travel and research budget, the academy told Quartz. The budget covers travel and research during the academic year — on top of tuition being free.
The school has also secured ten founding partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The partners offer co-op placements, access to compute power, and input into the curriculum, according to Quartz.
The Money Behind It
The Academy itself says the school has raised a total of $42 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Here the sources disagree: News18 writes that a16z has put $35 million into the concept, with a further $7 million from other investors. The figures could in principle be consistent, but no source confirms that this is actually the same sum of money, so the disagreement stands.
Marc Andreessen and Erik Torenberg join the board. Among the individual investors are Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, according to Quartz.
The Business Model: Its Own Portfolio
Here the picture becomes more nuanced than "free school" suggests. According to Bloomberg, cited by Quartz, Andreessen Horowitz is just as interested in placing candidates in companies already in the a16z portfolio as it is in taking stakes in startups that grow out of the academy. These are disclosed interests, not hidden ones: Cryptobriefing writes that a16z treats the Academy as a profitable venture, citing more than 19,000 open AI-related positions in the market as justification.
The next step is pricier: the academy plans to apply for regulatory approval for a two-year program launching in Fall 2028, which would charge tuition at the level of an elite private university, Biyani told TechCrunch, according to Quartz. That program is not yet accepting applications, and it depends on approval — it is not a guarantee.
What Remains to Be Clarified
Several central questions are open as long as the first cohort is about 18 months away:
- Accreditation. The school is not accredited today. Without accreditation, students receive no degree, and the fellowship's value rests on networks, internships, and portfolio — not formal proof of education. Whether the two-year program in 2028 will actually be approved is unclear.
- The financing. $42 million total led by a16z, or $35 million from a16z plus $7 million from others? The sources conflict.
- The partner count. The academy states more than 40 additional hiring partners; the San Francisco Chronicle writes more than 50, which Hoodline has pointed out as a discrepancy.
- Scalability. The entire model — 50 students, compute credits, close attention from ten partners — is designed for a small, curated cohort. Whether it works at larger scale, with paying students, is unverified.
For now, the safest thing one can say is that Andreessen Horowitz is spending tens of millions of dollars to test a different idea of what education can be: not grades, not exams, not a degree — but building, internships, and contact with industry. How the model works in practice, and what it means for students, will only become clear when the Founding Class starts in Fall 2027.