A twelve-week AI cohort, 25 minutes from Nottingham 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.
Nottingham is one of the most AI-fluent cities in the country and most people who live there have not noticed yet. Experian writes credit decisions with it. Capital One ships fraud models with it. Boots prices stock-keeping units with it. MoneyHub does the same for personal finance. The companies are here; the AI engineers who actually understand the production stack the companies are betting on are not.
The Moonlabs Academy is twenty-five minutes up the line. We are James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow: two operators who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk; have raised £5m+ for our own companies; and have built every internal tool and customer surface at all three around AI since the week ChatGPT shipped. We teach you to ship what we ship. Twelve weeks. Twelve students. In person, in Derby. £6,000.
If you are at UoN or NTU, on a sandwich year or final summer, you can be on the cohort and back in Nottingham every evening. East Midlands Trains runs the Derby–Nottingham route every fifteen minutes; the Academy venue is two minutes from Derby station. Past students have done exactly that — the day costs about what an hour parked in Hockley would.
Coding · what Experian and Capital One are hiring for
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, evals, deploys, observability. We teach you to ship the AI production stack the big Nottingham employers are quietly trying to staff up — deployed product by week twelve on your CV before any UoN or NTU CS finalist has graduated.
Commercials · sell into your own network
You already know somebody in a Nottingham SME who pays for a tool you could build better. Pricing, discovery calls, a one-page pilot agreement, the first £500 invoice. A paid pilot by week six; a real reference for the rest of your career.
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 — 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 Nottingham to the Academy in Derby?
Twenty-five minutes on a direct train, every fifteen minutes during the day. The Academy venue is two minutes’ walk from Derby station.
Can I do this while I am at UoN or NTU?
Several past students have. The Academy fits well into a sandwich year or the summer after final exams, with the university aware. We are full-time during the twelve weeks, so it is not compatible with a normal term.
Is there an accommodation option in Derby if I want to stay locally?
Yes. We can introduce you to short-term accommodation in central Derby at reasonable rates and to past Academy students who have done the same. Most Nottingham-based students simply commute.
How does this compare to AI courses in London?
You get the same level of teaching from working operators (rather than career trainers), in a deliberately small cohort of twelve, with a commute that is shorter than most London students endure and a cost of living that is roughly half.
What if I am in Loughborough, Mansfield, Leicester or further north?
All within an hour by train. Loughborough is 20 minutes. Leicester is 35. Sheffield is an hour. The Derby base was chosen partly because it sits inside that hour from most of the Midlands and the southern Yorkshire belt.
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 Nottingham. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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