AI for marketers, built by operators.
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 own the marketing functions across all three. Every piece of AI marketing tooling on this page is something we built, broke and ship every week.
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. Marketing is one of the functions AI is reshaping fastest and almost no course for marketers takes it seriously — most are LinkedIn walkthroughs of how to write better ChatGPT prompts. Useful for a week. Not useful for the next decade. You leave the Academy with a working AI marketing stack — content pipelines, agentic campaign workflows, brand-voice evals, attribution dashboards — and the engineering muscle to ship your own. That gap is currently worth a salary band, an agency rebrand, or a venture-backed product.
Coding · the marketer’s AI stack, built
Content pipelines that survive a brand-voice eval. Agentic campaign workflows. Attribution and lifecycle automation. A deployed marketing-AI product by week twelve — the work agencies are billing £15k/mo retainers for, run from your own laptop.
Commercials · the marketer-to-founder pivot
The marketer who can also build owns the leverage. Pricing an AI marketing offer, the discovery call, a one-page pilot, the first £500 invoice. A paid pilot by week six — sold either as a productised agency offer or back into a brand you already know.
Investment · raising on AI marketing tooling
Jasper raised $125m; Copy.ai, Mutiny, Surfer, AirOps all have live cap tables; agentic ad-buying is the live thesis on every UK seed deck right now. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model, term sheets. A live investor pipeline by demo day — with warm introductions to UK angels writing cheques in the space.
Common questions.
I have never coded. Is this course realistic for me?
Yes. AI tooling has collapsed the on-ramp dramatically. We have taken non-coding senior professionals through to a deployed product in twelve weeks. More on that here.
Will I learn growth marketing-specific things or general AI engineering?
Both. The general AI engineering — evals, agents, retrieval, prompt engineering — is the spine. The project work and case studies are shaped around marketing problems. The output is an AI marketing portfolio, not a generic one.
How does this compare to a marketing-specific AI course?
Most marketing-specific AI courses are taught by marketers who learned AI recently. The Academy is taught by operators who build production AI systems for a living. You get the deeper technical floor, then translate it back into the marketing context yourself.
Can my employer pay for this?
Often yes — the Apprenticeship Levy, L&D budgets and upskilling allowances can all apply. Full funding routes here.
I run an agency. Can I send several team members together?
Yes. Several agencies have sent two or three marketers together. Group discounts available; talk to us early.
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 your marketing function looks like today and what AI tool you would build for it — whether to keep, to sell, or to fund. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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