The AI internship that ships a real product.
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 hired interns at all three and seen how the corporate internship machine produces a generation of LinkedIn posts and not much else. The honest alternative on this page is the version we wish someone had offered us at twenty.
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. An AI internship at a large company is usually two weeks of onboarding, eight weeks watching a senior engineer, a polite presentation, and a LinkedIn post. There is nothing wrong with it — it is just not the most valuable thing you could do with twelve weeks of your early career. You leave the Academy with the artefacts a corporate internship structurally cannot produce: a deployed product, a paid pilot, a deck and a live investor pipeline. Some graduates take senior-band offers; some become co-founders of next-batch Moonlabs Incubator companies.
Coding · ship something, not watch someone
You do the work. A real AI product on a real domain — not a sandbox, not a dashboard demo, not a sticker on a Confluence page. Cursor, Claude Code, Codex on real frameworks; production retrieval, agents, evals, observability, deploy pipelines. A deployed AI product by week twelve — the artefact a corporate intern almost never produces.
Commercials · the paid pilot, not the polite presentation
A corporate internship presentation is a slide deck to a friendly room. An Academy demo day is a paid pilot signed and a live customer reference on the call. Five live discovery calls by week three. Pricing pushed against real buyer reactions. A paid pilot by week six — a different artefact entirely on the way out.
Investment · senior-band offer or founder seat
Corporate internship best-case outcome: a return offer at the grad-scheme rate. Academy best-case outcome: a senior-band engineering offer at AI-native employers (Anthropic, Cohere, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Faculty AI, Sierra), or a co-founder seat in the Moonlabs Incubator. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
Is this an internship in the legal sense?
No. The Moonlabs Academy is a twelve-week vocational course — you pay tuition, we deliver the course. Where a traditional internship would pay a stipend, the Academy delivers a portfolio and outcomes worth more in the medium term. Many students fund the tuition through bursaries, employer support or scholarships rather than a salary they would have earned.
When are the cohorts?
We run on a rolling basis. The summer cohort starts in mid-June and finishes in early September — designed to fit between final-year exams and the start of the next academic year, or to substitute for an unpaid internship of similar length.
Should I do this instead of a corporate AI internship?
Depends on what you want at the end of it. A corporate internship gives you a brand name. The Academy gives you a deployed product, paying users and a network of operators. In a technical interview the Academy artefact tends to beat the brand-name internship.
Can my university recognise this as a placement year?
Several universities have accepted Academy participation as part of a sandwich placement year. Talk to us early and we will write the supporting documentation.
What does it cost compared to an internship salary?
Tuition is £6,000 for the twelve weeks. We accept bursaries, scholarships, employer funding and apprenticeship routes. Compared to a typical unpaid or low-paid internship, the medium-term value of the Academy is materially higher for most students.
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 year of your degree or career you are in and what you would build first. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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