A twelve-week AI cohort in the middle of the country.
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.
The good AI bootcamps in the UK are mostly in London. The Midlands has the talent — De Montfort, Nottingham Trent, Derby, Birmingham, Loughborough, Leicester — without a serious operator-led cohort. Moonlabs is the answer. Two minutes from Derby station, reachable from every Midlands city inside an hour: Nottingham (25 min), Loughborough (20 min), Leicester (35 min), Birmingham (1h), Sheffield (1h).
Coding · the stack Midlands employers are hiring for
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, evals, deploys, observability. The Midlands hosts Rolls-Royce (Derby), JLR (Coventry/Solihull), Toyota Manufacturing UK (Derby), JCB (Staffs), HSBC UK HQ (Birmingham), Deutsche Bank Birmingham, BT, Capital One Nottingham, Experian Nottingham, Boots (Nottingham) and the WMG manufacturing-AI cluster — one of the densest hiring markets for AI engineers outside the South-East. A deployed product by week twelve.
Commercials · sell into the Midlands SMB belt
The Midlands has 100,000+ SMBs spending real money on tools an AI agent could replace, with the price ceiling materially below London and AI buying decisions mostly unmade. Pricing, discovery, a one-page pilot agreement, the first £500 invoice. A paid pilot by week six — for many graduates, sold into a Midlands business they already know.
Investment · the regional capital we know personally
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, the Birmingham angel network, WMCA, Mercia, plus the London pre-seed graph for graduates raising bigger — we know who actually writes cheques, and we make warm introductions. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I am in Nottingham / Leicester / Birmingham / Sheffield. Is the commute realistic?
Yes. Derby is a 25-minute train from Nottingham, an hour from Birmingham, ~1h10 from Leicester, and reachable from Sheffield, Loughborough, Stoke and most of the East Midlands inside an hour. Several past students have commuted in from Nottingham and Birmingham without any difficulty.
Is there accommodation help for out-of-area students?
We can introduce you to short-term accommodation in central Derby at reasonable rates, and to past Academy students who have made the same move. Many of our students stay in Derby afterwards — the cost of living is materially lower than London.
How is this different from a London AI bootcamp?
The teachers, the cohort size and the structure. Our cohorts are deliberately small (twelve), our teachers are working operators (not career trainers), and the three-pillar structure covers commercials and investment alongside the coding work. The output is a shipped business, not a job-interview portfolio.
Is it really an AI bootcamp or a startup programme?
Both, by design. AI tooling has collapsed the distance between ‘junior engineer’ and ‘founder who ships’. The Academy is built around the fact that the same twelve weeks can produce either, depending on what you do next.
What does it cost?
Tuition is £6,000 for the full twelve weeks. We accept any legitimate funding route — institutional bursaries, scholarships, employer or apprenticeship funding, self-funded with monthly instalments. Money is the last thing that should get in the way.
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 based across the Midlands. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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