Peter Thiel Funds More College-Leaving Entrepreneurs

Twenty more visionaries with interesting ideas

Billionaire investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel plans to announce Thursday the next group of 20 young men and women who will receive $100,000 each to work as tech entrepreneurs instead of spending that time on a college campus.

The group, dubbed the "20 Under 20" Thiel Fellows, is the third group of entrepreneurs the Thiel Foundation has funded. It includes Christopher Walker, who dropped out of college to form a software company, and Zach Hamed, a junior at Harvard who's leaving to work on education software.

Jonathan Cain, president of the Thiel Foundation, said in a statement that the previous groups of Thiel Fellows has launched more than 30 companies and have collectively raised over $34 million in outside funding.

It's an irreverent alternative to a traditional—and increasingly expensive—university education that reflects the iconoclastic entrepreneur's beliefs about a bubble in higher education.