AI for finance. For the people who build it.
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 have raised £5m+ across these companies, sit on the cap-table and term-sheet side of fundraising every week, and run an AI-native finance function across the group.
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. Finance is one of the highest-stakes places AI is moving into right now. IB analysts, hedge fund operations, FP&A leadership, corporate development, treasury — every one is being quietly rebuilt around agentic workflows, retrieval over deal documents, structured screening and continuous monitoring. The conference panels are loud; the people who can actually build it are rare. You return as the senior who can ship the AI — or as the founder of a fintech-AI product backed by investors you already know.
Coding · the finance-AI stack, built to audit
Deal screening, term-sheet extraction, retrieval over CIMs and 10-Ks, continuous portfolio monitoring, scenario analysis. Evals and observability from week one because numbers cannot be wrong and allocation decisions need a paper trail. A deployed finance-AI tool by week twelve — auditable by compliance and by your CIO.
Commercials · selling AI into a financial institution
Pricing the desk tool against a Bloomberg seat or an analyst headcount. Procurement, InfoSec sign-off, model-risk review, MD sponsor. A one-page pilot agreement with one team. A paid pilot by week six — for senior applicants, often back into the desk you arrived from.
Investment · raising on fintech-AI
Hebbia raised $130m from a16z, Rogo $50m from Khosla, Tegus acquired by AlphaSense at $930m, AlphaSense itself at $4bn, Anvilogic and Casetext-style picks all funded — finance-AI is one of the densest funded thesis areas of the cycle. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model, term sheets. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I am at a Tier-1 IB / hedge fund / large family office. Is the Academy too small for me?
No — we have had senior people from comparable institutions through the cohort. The Academy is deliberately small because that is the format the work requires; you will get more individual operator attention than at any equivalent corporate AI programme.
I have never coded. Is this realistic for a finance 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 finance and data fluency you bring is most of what you need.
Will I learn anything specific to alternative data, quant, or trading?
Lightly — the general AI engineering disciplines transfer cleanly to alt-data and signal-generation contexts, but the Academy is not a quant trading course. If a deep ML quant track is what you want, an academic master’s is a better artefact.
Can my employer fund this?
Often yes — L&D budgets, the Apprenticeship Levy (large UK financial institutions almost all pay it), and explicit AI upskilling allocations all apply. Full funding routes here.
How does this compare to specialist financial-AI courses from CFA or IMD?
Those courses are taught by educators; ours by operators who ship AI for a living. Different artefacts — theirs is a credential and a network; ours is a deployed product and an operator network. Many senior finance professionals do both at different points.
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 you sit in the finance function and what AI tool you would build for your desk — or as a product. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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