A twelve-week AI cohort, 20 minutes from Loughborough 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.
Loughborough is one of the strongest engineering schools in the UK, and a serious slice of its graduates leave the Midlands every year. A lot of them do not need to. Derby is 20 minutes up the line by direct train, every 15 minutes. This is the easiest commute in the country to a serious AI cohort.
Coding · the engineering pipeline Loughborough already feeds
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, evals, deploys, observability. Loughborough produces some of the strongest engineering graduates in the country — Rolls-Royce, BAE, Caterpillar, Bentley, Jaguar Land Rover, AstraZeneca and Toyota all recruit here every year. A deployed product by week twelve on your CV before you walk into any of those grad-scheme interviews.
Commercials · sandwich-year leverage
Loughborough sandwich years are the strongest sandwich placements in the country — Academy graduates have used the twelve weeks as the placement itself, returning to a final year with a deployed AI product and a paying pilot reference. Pricing, discovery, a one-page pilot agreement, the first £500 invoice. A paid pilot by week six.
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, Loughborough University Enterprise — 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 Loughborough to Derby?
Twenty minutes by direct train, roughly every fifteen minutes. The Academy venue is two minutes’ walk from Derby station.
I am at Loughborough University. 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 Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry?
All under 45 minutes 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 with your degree or your work at Loughborough. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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