A designer who ships AI surfaces.
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. We design and ship the surfaces ourselves — Figma to Cursor to production — every working day across all three companies.
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. AI changed the design job twice. First through generators — Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Figma AI. Then through agentic prototyping — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, v0, Lovable. The designers being promoted in 2026 use both layers; the designers being squeezed still treat AI as a moodboard tool. You leave the Academy as a design engineer — the role title the industry has converged on for this shape, paying a salary band that surprises people.
Coding · the designer-engineer stack
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex; React + Tailwind; v0 and Lovable where they earn their place; brand-voice evals and tone calibration. Prototypes that compile — you hand engineering a working version they can pick up, not a static deck that loses 30% of the intent. A deployed AI surface by week twelve.
Commercials · the design-engineer market rate
Design engineers at AI-native startups command Senior PM / Staff-Eng compensation. Pricing your own AI design retainer, the discovery call, a one-page pilot agreement, the first paying customer. A paid pilot by week six — for many graduates, a productised design-engineering offer sold back into a startup network they already know.
Investment · raising as a design-led founder
Linear (design-led, $400m+ raised), Vercel ($3.25bn), Framer, Lovable ($200m+) — design-led founders raise top-decile rounds because the product taste is visible in the demo. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model, term sheets. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I have never written code. Is this realistic?
Yes. AI tooling has collapsed the on-ramp dramatically; we have taken senior non-coding professionals through to a deployed product in twelve weeks. More on that here.
I am a brand / visual designer rather than UX. Will I be a fit?
Yes. The Academy is provider-agnostic on shape; brand designers tend to lean into the brand-voice evals, content pipelines and tooling around generation, while UX designers lean into prototyping and agent flows. Both are real career trajectories from here.
Will I learn Figma AI / Framer / v0 / Lovable?
Lightly, where they earn their place. The bigger value is the engineering layer underneath those tools — once you understand it, you can use any frontend prototyping tool more powerfully, and you stop being locked to one.
Can my employer fund this?
Often yes — L&D budgets and the Apprenticeship Levy can apply. Several design teams have funded their senior designers through the Academy as part of explicit AI upskilling. Full funding routes here.
Will I lose the design taste I have spent a decade building?
Honest answer: no. The taste does not go away; it gets a new layer of leverage. Most designers we have worked with find the engineering work expands what they can imagine, not what they can render.
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 design you do today and what AI surface you would ship first. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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