AI for creatives, by builders.
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. Three consumer brands with three distinct voices — every piece of content, every brand asset, every customer surface is built on AI tooling we wrote ourselves and tuned to taste.
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 on it. 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.
Why this page exists. Creative industries got AI in two waves. First the generators — Midjourney, Suno, Runway, ElevenLabs, Sora — which let everyone make a thing in five minutes. Then the agents — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex — which let the same person build the system that makes the thing reliably, at scale, with their own taste baked in. The creatives being promoted in 2026 use both layers; the ones being squeezed still treat AI as a moodboard generator. You leave the Academy as the creative who ships the AI — or the founder of a creative-AI product that does not look like the eighteenth AI image generator on Product Hunt.
Coding · the creative-AI stack, taste-faithful
Brand-voice evals, taste-faithful retrieval, agentic briefing, calibrated style rubrics. Music production pipelines that respect your sound, film pre-vis agents wired to your style, publishing automation that does not destroy your voice, asset generation that stays on-brand. A deployed creative-AI tool by week twelve — one that feels yours, not generic.
Commercials · the studio + agency retainer economics
A creative-AI retainer at £10-20k/mo for a brand is the new line item every agency CFO is approving. Pricing, the discovery call, a one-page pilot agreement, the first paying customer. A paid pilot by week six — for many graduates, a productised offer sold back into a creative network they already know.
Investment · raising on creative-AI tooling
Runway raised at $3bn, ElevenLabs at $3bn, Suno $125m, Pika $80m, Captions $25m, Krea, Higgsfield — creative-AI is one of the densest funded categories in the cycle. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model, term sheets. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I have never coded. Is this realistic for a creative professional?
Yes. AI tooling has collapsed the on-ramp; we have taken senior non-coding professionals through to a deployed product in twelve weeks. The taste fluency you bring from your existing work is most of what you need. More on that here.
Will the course turn my work into AI slop?
The opposite, deliberately. The course is largely about the disciplines that prevent generic output — style evals, reference grounding, hand-off discipline. The graduates we are proud of make work that feels more theirs, not less.
I am at an agency / studio. Can my employer fund this?
Often yes — L&D budgets and the Apprenticeship Levy apply for larger agencies and production companies. Full funding routes here.
What kinds of creative projects do past students build?
Past projects include: a film pre-vis agent for a small production company that turned a week of work into an afternoon; a music-production assistant fluent in one artist’s sample library; a publishing house drafting agent calibrated to in-house style; a brand-faithful asset-generation pipeline for an agency. The pattern is “a tool that creative people would actually keep using”.
How does this compare to the AI course for designers?
Adjacent but distinct. Designers focuses on UX, product design and the design-engineer trajectory. This page is for broader creative industries — music, film, advertising, publishing, art. Same Academy, different default project shape.
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 kind of creative work you do today and what AI tool you would build for it. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
© 2026 Moonlabs Incubator. All rights reserved.