Build an AI tutor. One a student would actually use.
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. The retrieval discipline on this page is the same one we use for serious legal, property and conveyancing surfaces ourselves — tutors that admit when they do not know, anchor to a real source, surface uncertainty.
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. There are already hundreds of AI tutor products on the App Store and the Web; almost none are products a student keeps using past week one. The bar that separates a tutor people pay for from a wrapper that retention-curves to zero is not the model — it is the disciplines around it: retrieval over the syllabus, structured feedback, evals that catch wrong answers, careful pacing, parent-facing dashboards. You leave the Academy with a deployed tutor real students use, real parents pay for — or as the founder of one of the few ed-tech AI products investors actually back in 2026.
Coding · the AI-tutor stack, syllabus-anchored
Real retrieval over real curricula (GCSE, A-Level, university, professional) with citation discipline that holds up to parental scrutiny. Agentic feedback loops that adjust to the student. Eval suites that score against actual learning, not against the model’s confidence. Streaming UIs students want to use. A deployed tutor with real student sessions by week twelve.
Commercials · pricing into parents, schools and B2C
Per-pupil subscriptions (£15-30/mo), per-school site licences (£5-30k/yr), MAT-level frameworks. The pilot conversation with a Head of Department is materially different from a SaaS demo — we teach both. A paid pilot by week six — with a parent, a tutor, a school or a small B2C audience.
Investment · raising on ed-tech AI
Khanmigo backed at Khan Academy scale, MagicSchool $15m, Brisk Teaching funded, Synthesis School raising at unicorn rumour, Eduai $25m, Edpuzzle, Quizlet AI, Speak ($20m+), Yousician AI — the ed-tech AI thesis is alive on UK funds (Brighteye, Reach Capital, Owl Ventures partnerships). Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
Do I need to be a teacher or educator to apply?
No — teachers, founders, parents who hate existing options, ed-tech engineers and curious operators have all made the course work. The bar is willingness to build something a student would actually use, not a teaching qualification.
Will I learn the safeguarding and child-data side?
Lightly — we cover GDPR, child-data handling, parental consent flows, and what a school procurement team will ask. We are not a safeguarding course; we will not pretend to be, and we will not let you ship blind to those constraints either.
What kinds of tutors do past students build?
Past projects have included GCSE Maths tutors, A-Level Chemistry revision tutors, MBA case-study coaches, language-learning agents, and a CIPD revision system. The wedge shapes the project; the underlying disciplines are the same.
How do you avoid the "AI gave the wrong answer" PR risk?
Evals, citation discipline, and humility about scope. We teach you to build a tutor that admits when it does not know, anchors to a real syllabus, and surfaces uncertainty — the disciplines that decide whether parents trust the tool.
Will I be able to raise for an AI tutor at the end?
Ed-tech is harder to raise for than horizontal SaaS, and AI tutors specifically are a crowded category. We will not pretend otherwise — we will pressure-test your fundraising story honestly during the cohort.
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 subject and audience you would build for. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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