Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI School as a College Alternative

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is launching a new program aimed at recent high school graduates and college dropouts that will identify and train young talent building artificial intelligence products.

The so-called Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a free program that offers housing, computing resources and travel funds, is meant to be an alternative for students that might otherwise attend elite universities, the firm said in a blog post Tuesday.

According to the firm, it’s looking for people who are already experimenting with technology and want to “learn at the speed of Silicon Valley,” through a combination of training from seasoned founders and building their own projects.

The Academy is launching with $42 million from Andreessen Horowitz, as well as individual investors including former Facebook Chief Technology Officer Adam D’Angelo and Palantir Technologies Inc. CTO Shyam Shankar.

The first class, which is slated to start in Fall 2027 in San Francisco and accept roughly 50 students, will run for one year, though the firm aims to offer a two-year program beginning the next year.

Tech is rife with tales of iconic young founders, often college dropouts, from Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg to Stripe’s Patrick Collison and John Collison. More recently, young AI builders such as Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang have seized the industry’s attention. The Thiel Fellowship, launched in 2011 by early Facebook investor Peter Thiel for people aged 22 or younger, propelled that narrative by serving as a training ground for founders like Figma Inc. Chief Executive Officer Dylan Field.

The central thesis, for many VCs, is that AI makes it easier to build companies with little experience or capital — and “AI-native” people, including those who have been using ChatGPT since they were young, are well-positioned to do this. Garry Tan, chief executive officer of famed VC accelerator Y Combinator, said last October that his program was seeing particularly rapid growth among founders ages 18 to 22.

Palantir launched its own program for recent high school graduates last year, an engineering-heavy training effort directly inside the company that it calls the the Meritocracy Fellowship. CEO Alex Karp has been perhaps tech’s most vocal leader on the subject of skipping college altogether; he has argued that AI will devalue college degrees and urged young people to go after skilled trades that are harder to automate instead.

The Horowitz Andreessen Academy was developed in partnership with tech companies such as Anthropic PBC, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Nvidia Corp. and Palantir, according to the firm. More than 40 additional companies, many of them among its portfolio companies, such as Databricks Inc. and Cognition AI Inc., have signed on to recruit Academy students after the program, the firm said.