AI for journalists, 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, have raised £5m+, and run real editorial workflows across the group every week. The fact-checking, retrieval and structured-analysis disciplines on this page are the same ones we use to publish responsibly ourselves.
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. Journalism is one of the most visibly disrupted industries in the AI era and one of the worst served by current AI training. The conference panels are loud; the working journalists who can ship the tools rather than write think-pieces about them are rare. You leave the Academy as the journalist who can build the AI — or as the founder of an independent newsroom-tech product, or a solo newsletter operator paying off a year of tuition inside the first quarter.
Coding · the newsroom-AI stack, built to publish from
Research retrieval over your archives, fact-checking agents with citation discipline, interview transcription and structured analysis, agentic newsletter drafting. Hallucination evals from week one and citation-faithful retrieval patterns — the difference between a tool you can publish from and one your legal department will pull. A deployed newsroom-AI tool by week twelve.
Commercials · the independent newsletter economics
A Substack at 1,000 paying subscribers at £10/mo is a £120k-a-year business one journalist can run on this stack. Pricing, paid tier launches, sponsorship economics, the discovery call when you sell research-grade AI tooling out to bigger newsrooms. A paid pilot or a paying audience by week six.
Investment · raising on journalism-tech AI
Otter at $500m+, Trint, Speak funded by a16z, Deepgram at $720m, Granola raising on agentic transcription, Bloomberg shipping internal AI — tooling that wraps journalism is a live thesis. 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; we have taken senior non-coding professionals through to a deployed product in twelve weeks. More on that here.
I am at the BBC / Reuters / Bloomberg / a national title. Can this fit?
Sometimes — via sabbatical, secondment, or buyout. Several past students have come from large media organisations. Honest conversation about your specific situation on the first call.
Will I learn how to evaluate vendor AI products too?
Yes. After twelve weeks of building you can read a Bloomberg AI, Otter, Trint, Speak demo with operator-grade scepticism. The procurement conversations change shape.
I am a freelancer / solo newsletter writer. Is this for me?
Yes — freelancers and solo newsletter operators are a strong fit. A working AI-augmented research and drafting stack often pays back its tuition cost inside the next year for solo journalists.
Will I be encouraged to use AI to write articles?
No — quite the opposite. The course is about building the research, fact-checking and analytical infrastructure around your journalism, not replacing the writing itself. The good newsrooms drawing this line are the ones whose tools are clearly yours.
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 journalism sits today and what newsroom AI tool you would build for it. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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