About 760 founders have gone through the program, called HBS Foundry, since it opened in April, a Harvard spokesperson told Fortune.

Harvard has tested the product with more than 100 universities across 50 states, according to the New York Times.

Participants move from an initial idea to an investor pitch over eight weeks. The workspace pairs Harvard Business School material with a peer community and AI agents trained on the work of specific faculty.

It also includes simulated video calls in which founders rehearse investor pitches, sales calls and board meetings against instructor avatars. The school invites top participants to Foundry Catalyst, a live program running in 2027, where they can compete for up to $100,000.

Foundry is not a degree program and carries no academic credit, the Harvard spokesperson told Fortune.

A year of MBA tuition at the school costs $84,760 in 2026-27, and Harvard Business School enrolled 943 students in its MBA Class of 2027.

The avatars were built with HeyGen, an AI video company, TechCrunch reported.

Faculty took part voluntarily through interviews, recording sessions and ongoing testing, and the seven cloned instructors have backgrounds spanning venture capital, business-model design, board dynamics and startup strategy, according to Fortune.

Harvard programmed the agents to resist the flattery that large language models default to, Tom Eisenmann, a faculty co-chair of the project, told the Times.

Virtually no startup idea clears them on a first attempt, he said, and one founder spent 10 hours cycling through attempts, which Eisenmann described as impressive but beside the point.

A pedestrian casts a shadow on a Harvard University sign in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., Sept. 30, 2025. Photo by Reuters

The school's MBA handbook caps Category I grades at 15% to 20% of a first-year section and assigns roughly the lowest 10% a Category III. Faculty cannot request adjustments to the distribution.

Times reporter Sarah Kessler tested the system by pitching a deliberately implausible banana-delivery startup to a digital copy of Jeff Bussgang, co-founder of the venture firm Flybridge Capital and a senior lecturer at the school.

She wrote that the avatar held a fixed smile and looped a single shoulder movement. Bussgang told her the effect was unsettling but that his students responded well to it.

Harold Solomon, a principal at Georgia Tech's Quadrant-i commercialization program, folded Foundry into a 12-week workshop for doctoral students and faculty over the summer and has signed on to keep offering it. He can run 20 or 30 meetings a week and no more, he told the Times.

Pranav Sultania, a mechanical engineering doctoral candidate at Boston University, used the avatars while building Magnesis Robotics, which is developing a squid-inspired electromagnetic propulsion and pumping system for underwater vehicles.

They pushed him to narrow a long list of applications to one, he told the Times, and were available at hours that suited a founder who is also a full-time student.

Imperial Business School has created digital twins of its professors, and Georgia Tech professor David Joyner built an avatar of himself for an online course on the edX platform, Fortune reported.

Kian Katanforoosh, a Stanford lecturer and founder of the AI skills platform Workera, told Fortune that AI can answer unlimited questions and reframe explanations but cannot know a student as a person or stake its own reputation on the outcome.

Shikhar Ghosh, one of the cloned Harvard professors, made a narrower claim to the same outlet: "The goal isn't to create a substitute for me."

The most popular feature so far has not been the AI, Eisenmann told the Times. It has been the peer discussion forums.

"But it keeps coming back to humanity."