Gagan Biyani announced the establishment of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy in San Francisco, targeting the most promising high school graduates, with project-based learning at its core, supplemented by courses and lectures from Silicon Valley professionals.

The institution claims to have raised $42 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Biyani as CEO, and Marc Andreessen and Erik Torenberg joining the board. The Q&A page states that the venture capital firm incubated this independent company and invested $35 million. Founding partners include Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe; it also mentions over 50 recruiting partners and more than 200 speakers and mentors. Individual investors include Adam D'Angelo, Tobi Lütke, Tony Xu, Fidji Simo, Garry Tan, among others.

The founding class will have approximately 50 scholarships, lasting one year and tuition-free, starting in the fall of 2027, with admissions based on completed, launched, or earned projects, not solely on grades and standardized tests. Students will manage their own accommodation, with the school assisting in pairing; there will also be over $50,000 in computing credits and a $5,000 travel research budget. After regulatory approval, a two-year paid program is planned to start in the fall of 2028, with tuition comparable to elite private universities. The first year will not confer transferable credit degrees.

Biyani previously co-founded Udemy and Maven. The target audience includes recent high school graduates or those who have attended college for one or two years, aged approximately 16 to 22. The official website is open for applications for the founding class, recruiting partners, and faculty positions.

This is part of the competition for talent entry. The buyers are ten founding companies looking to directly hire builders, while the sellers are the admissions and credit systems of four-year universities. Funding will shift from university tuition accounts to a venture capital-funded one-year pilot, with plans to transition into a paid two-year program; beneficiaries will be partner companies that can secure intern sources early and the funds managing this network, while traditional colleges that still rely on papers and standardized tests for screening, and cannot offer an equivalent list of mentors, will be under pressure. The tuition-free model only covers about 50 students in the first class, making the scale itself a selection mechanism.

Source: Public Information