A twelve-week AI cohort, 35 minutes from Leicester station.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk, have raised £5m+ for their own companies, and have been AI-native since the week ChatGPT shipped.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
Leicester has UoL, DMU and a strong technical talent pipeline. Derby is 35 minutes up the line by direct train, every half hour. This is a commute question, not a relocation question. Several past Leicester students have travelled in daily without difficulty; the Academy day fits around a Leicester-based life with no move required.
Coding · what Hastings, Mattioli Woods and Next.co.uk are hiring for
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, evals, deploys, observability. We teach you to ship the production AI stack the big Leicester employers are quietly trying to staff up — Hastings, Mattioli Woods, Next.co.uk, Dunelm, Topps Tiles, Cofresh, Walkers. A deployed product by week twelve on your CV before any UoL or DMU CS finalist has graduated.
Commercials · sell into the East Midlands SMB market
Leicester sits inside the densest manufacturing and logistics belt in England — 40,000+ SMBs paying for tools an AI agent could replace. Pricing, discovery calls, a one-page pilot agreement, the first £500 invoice. A paid pilot by week six — for many graduates, sold into a Leicester business they already know.
Investment · the Midlands angel network
Cap table from week two, ten-slide deck, financial model, term sheets line by line. Midlands Engine, ART Business Loans, the East Midlands angel network, Mercia — we know it, we use it, and we make warm introductions. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
How long is the commute from Leicester to Derby?
Thirty-five minutes by direct train, roughly every half hour. The Academy venue is two minutes’ walk from Derby station — practical door-to-door is around an hour.
I am at UoL or DMU. Can I fit this around my degree?
The Academy is full-time during the twelve weeks. Best fits are sandwich-year placements, gap years, or the summer between final exams and the next academic year. Several past students have done exactly that.
Is there accommodation help if I want to stay in Derby?
Yes — we can introduce you to short-term central Derby accommodation at sensible rates, and to past Academy students who have done the same.
How does this compare to AI courses in London?
Same level of teaching, half the cost of living, a cohort of twelve rather than two hundred, taught by working operators rather than career trainers. The Derby base is a feature, not a constraint.
What about Loughborough, Coventry, Nottingham, Birmingham?
All under an hour by train. We have had students commute in from each. The Academy is structured around being reachable from most of the Midlands in an hour or less.
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us what you would build and where you are studying or working in Leicester. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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