The portfolio that actually gets you hired.
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 sit on the buyer side of AI engineering hiring every working week — we know exactly which kinds of portfolio close interviews and which get politely ignored.
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. Hiring teams at AI-native companies have stopped reading CVs first — they ask for the project. Most candidates send a weekend Streamlit demo. The candidates who get hired send a deployed product on a real domain, with auth, billing, evals, and a paying customer reference. You leave the Academy with exactly that artefact — or with a founder shape that lets you skip the application process entirely.
Coding · the deployed-product portfolio piece
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex on real frameworks. Auth, billing, Postgres + pgvector, structured logs, observability, agents, retrieval, eval suites in CI that catch regressions, prompt-injection defence. Live on a real domain — not a Streamlit screenshot. A deployed AI product by week twelve — the artefact recruiters at AI-natives ask for before they read the CV.
Commercials · the paid pilot reference recruiters love
A weekend side project has no paying users. The Academy portfolio includes a real customer who paid for it, willing to take a recruiter call. The single strongest signal an AI engineer CV can carry in 2026 — better than a top-tier degree, better than a brand-name internship. A paid pilot by week six.
Investment · the founder option, not just the offer
AI-native employers (Anthropic, Cohere, ElevenLabs, Mistral, Wayve, Faculty AI, Sierra, Hebbia, Glean, Decagon) pay senior-AI engineers 3-4x conventional senior-eng rates with shipping evidence. The same portfolio is also a credible seed-round pitch — cap table, deck, financial model, warm introductions to UK pre-seed (Plural, Local Globe, Concrete VC, Pi Labs, EF). A live investor pipeline by demo day — or a senior-AI offer in your inbox, your call.
Common questions.
Will my Academy project actually be hireable-level?
It will be a deployed, monitored, paying-ready product on a real domain — we know that because every cohort produces them. The product itself is determined by your wedge; what is consistent is the quality bar.
Will I keep the project after the cohort?
Yes. The product is yours. You leave with the code, the domain, the infrastructure access, the eval suites and the customer reference. There is no lock-in to Moonlabs infrastructure.
Can I use the Academy project to apply for a specific job afterwards?
Yes — many graduates have. We will help you frame the artefact in the way the role actually expects. The deployed product carries; the cover letter is incidental.
How does this compare to building a portfolio on my own?
Faster, harder, and with twelve weeks of operator review you cannot get alone. Most engineers who build alone never get past auth and billing for a side project. The Academy compresses the arc and adds the review you cannot replicate solo.
What about open-source contributions? Do those count?
They do, alongside — not instead of. Hiring teams want both: a deployed product (yours) plus a track record of contribution (open source, blog posts, talks). The Academy adds the first; the Academy network is also where the second often starts.
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 are starting from and which AI-native employer you would want the portfolio piece to land at. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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