A twelve-week AI cohort, not a three-year retrain.
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.
Most AI bootcamps are built for twenty-two-year-olds. Most senior MBAs do not teach the engineering. The Academy is built for the middle — the working lawyer, accountant, PM, salesperson, doctor, marketer, ex-consulting or ex-finance professional with a decade of pattern recognition who needs the engineering and the AI-native muscle memory grafted on top. The room is mostly in its thirties and forties.
Coding · the production stack your old career skipped
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, production retrieval, agents, evals, observability, deploy pipelines. The AI engineering stack you have read about but never written, taught in real production conditions. Domain fluency from your old career is a feature, not a bug — it shapes the wedge. A deployed AI product by week twelve.
Commercials · the network you arrive with
Career changers bring something twenty-two-year-olds do not: a network of buyers in an industry they already know. That network is half the work of finding the first paying pilot. Five live discovery calls by week three. A paid pilot by week six — for many graduates, sold back into the industry they came from.
Investment · the founder shape investors actually back
Most successful AI founders are not pure engineers — they bring domain knowledge plus the engineering capacity. That is the shape Plural, Local Globe, Concrete VC, Pi Labs, EF and Forward Partners back at pre-seed. Cap table from week two, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day — or a senior-band AI offer at an AI-native employer that values domain depth.
Common questions.
I am in my forties and have a mortgage. Is this realistic?
Honest answer: it depends. We have had students in their thirties, forties and fifties graduate the cohort. The Academy is full-time during the twelve weeks, in person in Derby — that is a real life constraint. We will have an honest conversation about whether it fits before either side commits.
What if I have not coded since university?
You will be fine. The AI tooling has collapsed the distance dramatically — we have taken students from zero code in a decade to deployed product in twelve weeks. The commercial pattern recognition you bring from a previous career is a feature, not a bug.
How is this different from an MBA?
An MBA teaches you to manage businesses. The Academy teaches you to build them, AI-natively, end to end. Different artefacts. Some career changers do both — Academy first, MBA later, or the reverse. Pick the artefact your next move actually needs.
Can my current employer fund this?
Often, yes — especially if you are pivoting internally to an AI role. The Apprenticeship Levy can apply to qualifying programmes; many employers will support upskilling outright; we are happy to write the supporting letter. Full funding routes here.
What about remote? My family is not in Derby.
The Academy is intentionally in person. We can introduce you to short-term accommodation in central Derby at sensible rates, and to past students who have done the same. The case for being in the room is the case for the Academy.
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 do today and what you would build next. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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