A twelve-week AI cohort your degree did not include.
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.
Your degree taught you a lot. It did not teach you to ship, to price, to sell, or to raise — and those are the questions that decide what your first ten years of career look like. The Academy is the finishing year nobody offered you: the twelve weeks that produce the artefacts your CV is currently missing. Past graduates have been hired straight into senior-band roles, co-founded next-batch incubator companies, or banked the offer and deferred for twelve weeks first.
Coding · the production stack your CS degree skipped
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, production retrieval, agents, evals, observability, deploy pipelines, prompt-injection defence — the stack 2026 hiring managers ask for and almost no UK undergraduate course teaches. A deployed AI product by week twelve — the artefact your degree did not produce.
Commercials · the 3-4x AI-native salary band
AI-native employers (Anthropic, Cohere, ElevenLabs, Mistral, Wayve, Faculty AI, Sierra, Hebbia, Glean, Decagon) pay graduate AI engineers 3-4x the typical UK grad-scheme rate — if you can show shipping evidence. Pricing your own work, the discovery call, a one-page pilot agreement. A credible senior-band offer or a paid pilot by week six.
Investment · founder option at 22, not 32
Most CS grads spend the first decade waiting for the founder moment. The Academy gives you the moment now. Cap table from week two, ten-slide deck, financial model. Warm introductions to UK pre-seed (Plural, Local Globe, Concrete VC, Pi Labs, EF, Forward Partners). Cursor founders shipped at 22; Lovable’s did too. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I have just graduated with a non-CS degree. Is this for me?
Yes. We have had philosophy graduates, history graduates, life-science graduates and engineers in the same cohort. AI tooling has collapsed the on-ramp; the bar is willingness to do the work.
I am graduating in summer. When do I apply?
Now. We review on a rolling basis and the summer cohort fills early. The application is short — fifteen minutes — and James and Louis read every one personally.
Will this conflict with a graduate job offer I already have?
Many graduates have done the Academy with a job offer banked, choosing to defer or to start the role with a deployed Academy product in their portfolio. Honest conversation about your specific situation on the first call.
How does this compare to a masters degree in AI?
A masters teaches you the underlying ML theory at depth. The Academy teaches you to engineer, ship and sell an AI product. Some graduates do both — Academy first, masters second, or the reverse. Pick the artefact that matches what you want next.
What about funding?
Tuition is £6,000. Bursaries, scholarships, employer support and apprenticeship routes all accepted. Some graduates have funded the Academy from a signing bonus or a salary they were about to start.
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 when you graduate and what you would build. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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