A twelve-week AI cohort for engineers who already ship.
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 in the UK are aimed at people new to engineering. That is the wrong shape for a senior software engineer. You already ship Postgres, auth, billing, deploys, observability. What you need is the AI engineering layer the industry has built around frontier models — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, RAG, agents, evals, observability — plus the commercials and investment work that turn engineering taste into shipped product.
Coding · the layer your degree-era stack is missing
Cursor, Claude Code and Codex at keystroke fluency. Production retrieval (pgvector to dedicated stores), agent orchestration (LangGraph, MCP), eval suites in CI, observability, prompt-injection defence, cost discipline. The senior-engineer stack 2026 hiring managers ask for — the half no UK CS degree teaches. A deployed AI product by week twelve.
Commercials · the 3-4x AI-native salary band
Senior engineers at AI-natives (Anthropic, Cohere, ElevenLabs, Mistral, Wayve, Faculty AI, Sierra, Hebbia, Glean, Decagon) command 3-4x conventional senior-eng rates — if you can show shipping evidence on the AI layer. Pricing your own work, the discovery call, a one-page pilot agreement. A paid pilot or a senior-AI offer by week six.
Investment · the bridge from senior IC to founder
Most senior engineers spend a decade thinking about the founder leap before they take it. The Academy compresses it into twelve weeks. Cap table from week two, ten-slide deck, financial model. Senior-engineer-turned-founder is the pattern Cursor / Lovable / Granola / Cognition / Replit Agent / ChatPRD all matched. Warm introductions to UK pre-seed (Plural, Local Globe, Concrete VC, Pi Labs, EF). A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I have ten years of engineering experience. Will I be bored?
No — we will push you further. Senior engineers tend to reach the highest ceiling in the Academy because the engineering layer is already there; the AI engineering and commercial pillars are what get bolted on. You move faster, ship more, and the artefact is correspondingly stronger.
How is this different from the prompt engineering / RAG / agents pages?
Same Academy, different entry door. Those pages frame the curriculum around one technical surface; this page frames it around the engineer-as-audience question. Same twelve weeks underneath.
Will I learn deep ML theory or research-grade work?
Not at depth. Almost no useful AI engineering in 2026 trains models from scratch — the work is engineering on top of frontier APIs. If a research career is what you want, a serious UK academic masters is the better artefact.
Can my employer fund this?
Often yes — senior engineering L&D allocations, the Apprenticeship Levy, and explicit AI upskilling budgets all apply. Full funding routes here.
I want to leave engineering for founding. Is this the right route?
Often yes — engineers leaning founder are among our strongest cohorts. The commercial pillar is what most engineers identify as their gap; twelve weeks of it alongside operators tends to be the catalyst. Founder-shaped framing here.
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 where your engineering work sits today and what you would build next. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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