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Andreessen Horowitz is opening The Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a one-year, tuition-free program in San Francisco for about 50 high school graduates who haven't attended college. The program mixes technical coursework with mentorship from tech industry figures, and is backed by $42 million in funding as a for-profit venture led by CEO Gagan Biyani.
Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz is opening the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a one-year, ungraded program meant to funnel young people into Silicon Valley startups. Ten partner companies, including Google, Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and Anthropic, will host students in 'co-op' placements, backed by $42 million in a16z-led funding, compute credits, and a travel stipend. The program grants no degree and requires participants to relocate to San Francisco and cover their own housing.
Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million into a two-year academy positioned as an alternative to traditional college education. Several other Bay Area tech companies and figures are also supporting the effort, signaling broad industry interest in reshaping how young talent is trained for tech careers.
Vals, a startup founded in 2024 by former Palantir intern and Stanford student Rayan Krishnan, has raised a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, following an earlier seed round from 8VC and Bloomberg Beta. The company aims to replace outdated academic AI benchmarks, which it says fail to keep pace with rapidly improving models, with more rigorous evaluation methods.
Super PACs tied to AI companies and investors have funneled almost $1 million to support Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, even though he faces little competition in his reelection race. About $600,000 came through the group Defend American Jobs, backed by Andreessen Horowitz-linked funding, while another $215,000 arrived directly from employees and PACs connected to Anthropic, Google and Microsoft.
Elon Musk's tunneling venture The Boring Company closed a $3 billion Series D funding round led by the United Arab Emirates, valuing the company at $23 billion. As part of the deal, the company plans to build more than 150 kilometers of tunnels in the UAE. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Human Capital, Vy Capital and Valor Equity Partners.
Defense startup Covenant announced it has emerged from stealth mode with $250 million raised across three funding rounds, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Lux, 8VC, Aleph and Lightspeed. The company opened a 105,000-square-foot factory in Dallas to build its Anthem long-range cruise missiles, aiming to produce 1,000 units in the first year starting in early 2027 and scaling to 5,000 annually.
Cognition, maker of the AI coding assistant Devin, closed a $2 billion funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir, pushing its valuation to $48 billion—up from $26 billion just four months earlier. The company says its annualized run-rate revenue nearly doubled since May, climbing from $492 million to $900 million.
Gimlet Labs has closed a $300 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Arm, Samsung Ventures, Tiger Global and others. The company says it has added billions in contracted revenue and gigawatts of datacenter pipeline since March, and is scaling toward hundreds of megawatts of managed capacity, just five months after its Series A.
Andreessen Horowitz has boosted its fifth growth-stage fund by $1.75 billion, bringing its total to $8.5 billion after launching in January at $6.75 billion. The expansion comes just days after the firm closed a separate $1.1 billion 'Machine Age Fund' targeting AI hardware startups working on chips, memory, networking, and storage.
Build American AI, a new group tied to the super PAC Leading the Future, plans a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in Kansas, Ohio, and Wisconsin to build public support for local data centers. Leading the Future was seeded with over $50 million from investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and has mainly spent that money backing pro-AI candidates and opposing those skeptical of the technology.
Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has been highlighting renewed investor enthusiasm for hardware startups after a period dominated by software and AI-model bets. This comes as Casado also helped lead the firm's recent investments in OpenRouter and Cursor, underscoring his active month across multiple deal categories.