The operators of tomorrow.
A twelve-week, hands-on AI course built around three pillars — Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve students per cohort. Real projects shipped weekly, with James and Louis in the room.
Coding is no longer the bottleneck.
Every twenty-year-old in our cohorts can ship a working SaaS in a weekend. Almost none of them can price it, sell it, or raise on it. The gap is the single most important thing happening in early-career technical education.
The Academy is structured around the new shape of the work. Coding the way operators actually code in 2026. Commercials taught by repping real calls with real prospects. Investment learned by watching a real round get closed, with the operators who close them in the room.
Coding. Commercials. Investment.
Every week of the twelve-week cohort touches all three. Operators do not get to be in an engineering frame on Tuesday and a sales frame on Thursday. The course is built to train that shift from week one.
Coding
AI-native production engineering.
Cursor, Claude Code, agentic workflows, evals, deploy pipelines, observability. The actual stack we use to run real businesses, taught at the level the student's own project demands.
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Cursor + Claude Code fluency -
AI agents as a product feature -
Postgres, auth, billing, deploy -
Evals, observability, hardening -
Code review when the agent shipped half of it
Commercials
The skills most courses skip entirely.
Positioning, pricing, the first ten sales calls, contracts, distribution, margin. Taught by having the student price and sell their own project, under real conditions, with us in the room when it lands.
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Pricing intuitions and stress-tests -
Discovery calls (you run five live) -
Sales document landing pages -
Pilot contracts and pricing letters -
Margin, payback, and unit economics
Investment
How money actually moves.
Cap tables, term sheets, the data room, the deck that survives diligence, the warm introduction. Taught by watching a real round get closed by people who have closed rounds at five and ten million.
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Cap table from week two -
Financial model that survives diligence -
Term sheets line by line -
Cold investor outreach campaigns -
HNWI introductions and ecosystem
Twelve weeks. One real company shipped.
Every week ships an artifact. Every artifact goes into your operator portfolio. By week twelve you have a deployed product, paying pilots, a deck, a financial model, and a live investor pipeline.
The wedge
Define the buyer, the pain, and the smallest shippable thing. Stack set up, deployed scaffold live by Friday. Pricing intuitions. The first look at a real company P&L.
First shipped thing
A working, deployed, publicly accessible piece of your wedge live by Friday at 4pm. Landing page rewritten as a sales document. Cap table opened.
First five conversations
Five real buyer calls run by you with us in the room. Discovery call structure. Product feedback loop and analytics built. Market sizing exercise.
Reprice the wedge
Wedge document rewritten with conversation data. AI features added as evals-backed product surfaces. Pricing stress-test. Dilution modelling.
The deck v1
Ten true slides. Defended in front of the cohort the next day. Elevator pitch rehearsed. Real decks (raised vs not raised) deconstructed.
First paid commitment
Pilot agreement, LOI, or paid trial signed by Friday. Production-grade auth, billing, customer onboarding. SAFE vs equity decision walked through.
Mid-course pivot window
Honest one-on-ones. Refactor week on the codebase, line by line. Positioning rewrite. Data room structure introduced and built.
Demo day prep, first pass
Pitch rewritten. The anti-pitch exercise. Named customer reference secured. Financial model built from template and stress-tested.
The cold campaign
List of fifty plausible investors built and sharpened. Cold outreach written by hand, sent Tuesday. Production hardening: Sentry, structured logs.
First investor calls
The three pillars lock together on a real call. Objection handling drilled. Model stress-tested against actual investor questions.
Demo day rehearsal
Mock demo day in front of three independent operators. Written and verbal feedback. Second pass with edits made by Friday.
Demo day
Live in front of an invited audience of investors, operators, and prospective customers. Drinks. Pipeline conversations that close in the following weeks.
Summer 2026 cohort.
Next cohort coming.
Twelve weeks. 12 students. Starts Monday 15 June 2026. Application deadline Friday 5 June 2026. We review on a rolling basis, so the earlier you apply the more likely you reach the shortlist.
Cohort-based. Hands-on. Real.
What you walk out with.
A deployed product
Not a prototype. A live, monitored, paying-ready product on a real domain that you alone shipped.
Real customer commitments
Signed pilots, paid trials or LOIs from named customers. Not lab tests. Real money on the table.
An investable deck and model
A ten-slide deck and a financial model that we have seen survive the questions real investors ask.
A live investor pipeline
Curated list of investors who fit the wedge, with cold and warm outreach already in motion by demo day.
A pitch you can run cold
Tested in front of operators and investors who do this for a living. Body language, anti-pitch, the lot.
Hireability at senior bands
On paper you are a graduate. In practice you can do work that hires elsewhere call senior. Several of ours have been hired into roles paying senior salaries.
Not a Udemy course. Not a bootcamp.
The honest comparison with the other options. You should pick the one that fits.
Read the essays.
The arguments behind every part of the curriculum, written down at length. Read these before you apply.
A clear price. Many ways to fund it.
Educators, please point your students at this section. Parents — there is a page specifically for you. We accept any legitimate funding route and we want money to be the last thing in the way.
Tuition rate per student, per week of the cohort. The headline number you will quote to a funder.
Full tuition for the cohort. Pay up front or in monthly instalments across the twelve weeks.
Twelve students per cohort, two operators in the room. Roughly 1:6 student-to-teacher ratio.
A Claude Max subscription for the cohort, on us.
Every student gets a Claude Max subscription paid for by Moonlabs for the full twelve weeks. We are not going to teach you to build with AI on the free tier — the tools we use day to day to run our own businesses are the tools you will use to ship yours. No surprise spend, no “upgrade required” mid-project.
Any legitimate funding source is welcome.
Universities, sixth-forms and colleges hold hardship and discretionary funds. Ask your tutor, course leader or student services. They are not always advertised but they are often there.
Local trusts, foundations and professional bodies fund upskilling all the time. We will write the supporting letter your application needs.
Many employers cover upskilling outright, and the UK Apprenticeship Levy can apply to qualifying programmes. Worth a conversation with your manager or HR.
Pay up front, or spread the cost monthly across the twelve weeks. We will work with you on a plan. Investing in yourself is a perfectly good answer.
Selection is on motivation and fit, not on who pays. If money is the obstacle, talk to us early. There is almost always a route, and we would rather have that conversation than lose a strong applicant to a forgotten bursary form.
The questions we get most.
Do I need to be able to code already?
No. We have taken students from a standing start to shipped product in twelve weeks. The bar is that you must be willing to actually do the work. The AI tooling has made the on-ramp shorter than at any point in the last twenty years.
Is this an undergraduate degree?
No. The Academy is a private twelve-week vocational course. It does not award a degree. The graduates of the course routinely receive offers from employers at salaries that look senior on paper, because the output is what matters.
How does this compare to jointakeoff or similar AI courses?
Online AI courses do a competent job teaching tooling. They do not teach commercials or investment, and they are not run by operators who close real rounds. We are deliberately small, deliberately operator-led, and deliberately three-pillar.
What does "operator-led" actually mean?
It means James and Louis are the teachers. The same people who run home.co.uk, Homemove and homedata.co.uk are the people in the room. Not a teaching assistant, not a recorded video, not a Slack-only cohort. Direct access for twelve weeks.
What happens after demo day?
A subset of graduates are hired into the Moonlabs portfolio. A subset go on to be co-founders on the next batch of incubator companies. A subset are introduced to companies in our wider network actively looking to hire operators of this calibre. Nobody graduates without options.
When is the next cohort?
Cohorts run on a rolling basis. The application form will tell you which cohort you are being considered for. We read every application personally.
James and Louis are the teachers.
Not a teaching assistant, not a recorded course, not a Slack-only cohort. The same operators who run the businesses are the ones in the room.
Apply for the next cohortYour next chapter starts here.
Tell us about the company you want to build. If we’re a fit, we’ll get back within a week.
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