Inside a Moonlabs demo day

We get asked, by both employers and parents, what demo day actually is. "Is it a pitch competition? Is it a graduation ceremony? Do I have to bring a chequebook?" This post is the inside view, written ahead of our first cohort's demo day on 3 September 2026, so that anyone considering attending knows what they are signing up for.

The format, end to end

Demo day runs from 10:00 to 17:00 at a venue in central Derby (six minutes' walk from Derby station). The audience is split three ways: parents and supporters of the cohort, employers who are hiring AI-native operators, and investors who are looking for early-stage AI companies to fund. Roughly forty people in the room, plus the twelve graduates and the two of us running the day.

The structure:

• 10:00 — Arrival, coffee, mingling. Graduates have their workstations set up around the room with their products live and demo-able. Audience members wander, talk to graduates, see the products work.
• 10:30 — Cohort overview. Twenty minutes from the two of us walking through the cohort, the curriculum, the things they have built collectively. Frames what is coming.
• 11:00 — Pitches block one. Six graduates present, six minutes each plus two minutes of questions. Total ninety minutes.
• 12:30 — Lunch. Catered, sit-down. Graduates seated across tables with audience members for unstructured conversation. The single highest-value hour of the day.
• 14:00 — Pitches block two. The remaining six graduates. Same format.
• 15:30 — Roundtable Q&A with the cohort. Audience asks questions, all twelve graduates take them. This is where you find out who can think under pressure.
• 16:00 — Networking, follow-up scheduling. Graduates and audience members book follow-ups directly. The two of us facilitate where useful.
• 17:00 — Day ends.

We have iterated this format with input from operators in our network who have run cohort programmes before. The lunch and the roundtable Q&A are the elements most operators leave out; we think they are the most predictive of post-demo outcomes.

What each graduate presents

Each six-minute pitch is structured. We coach the cohort towards a five-slide template across the twelve weeks:

1. What we built. A clear product description, live demo of the working product, twenty seconds maximum on the technical stack.
2. The customer. Who pays for this, what they were doing before, what evidence we have that they want to keep paying.
3. The numbers. Revenue to date, pipeline, CAC if we know it, unit economics if we have them.
4. The next twelve weeks. Exactly what we will do post-demo, with what investment if any.
5. The ask. Hiring offer, investor conversations, pilot customers, advisor introductions. Specific, named, time-bound.

The pitches are not theatre. Every product is live. Every revenue number is real. Every customer name is verifiable. We coach the cohort relentlessly against the temptation to demo on staging, quote committed revenue as actualised, or project ARR off a single signed pilot. The companies that make it to demo day with real numbers and real customers are the ones audience members remember.

The audience composition matters

We deliberately keep the room at forty people. We have seen demo days with two hundred attendees; the result is a noisy room, low-quality conversations, and graduates who finish the day exhausted with no follow-ups booked. Forty is the number where every graduate gets ten meaningful five-to-fifteen-minute conversations across the day.

The audience composition for 3 September 2026:

• 14 employers, weighted towards UK companies that are actively building AI products and need their first or second AI engineering hire
• 10 investors, weighted towards angels and pre-seed funds operating in the £25k-£250k cheque size
• 12 parents and family, sitting alongside their student
• 4 advisors and operators from our wider network

We curate the employer and investor lists carefully. We want each graduate to have, before the day starts, at least two warm conversations they want to pursue. The conversion from those into offers and term sheets is materially better than the cold-outreach baseline.

What outcomes look like

We have set our own expectations against the cohort programmes that have come before in the UK and the US. The conservative baseline for a well-run cohort of twelve:

• Three to five of the graduates raise a pre-seed round within ninety days of demo day. Median cheque size £150k-£500k.
• Three to five of the graduates take an employment offer within ninety days. Median band £55k-£75k for the cohort overall, with two to three at the higher £80k-£100k range.
• One to two of the graduates continue their company under their own steam without external funding, supported by Moonlabs in a light-touch advisory capacity.
• One to two pivot post-demo into a different role or path — taking the skills but not the company.

These are not promises. They are the cohort statistics that comparable programmes have published, calibrated to our cohort size and our market. If our first demo day produces materially worse outcomes than this, we will say so publicly and we will iterate the next cohort accordingly.

What we deliberately do not do

A small list of things audiences sometimes expect at demo days that we have chosen not to do.

• We do not run a prize or a winner. The framing is wrong. The graduate who wins demo day is rarely the graduate with the best company twelve months later; we do not want to anchor anyone to an early-stage popularity contest.
• We do not require investor-only sessions. Some demo days separate employers and investors into different tracks. We mix the audience deliberately because most graduates want both kinds of conversation.
• We do not provide post-event recordings publicly. Pitches are live and to a private room. We share recordings with attendees and with applicants to future cohorts on request. We do not publish them on YouTube.
• We do not take a cut of fundraises or placements. Moonlabs's interest in graduate outcomes is reputational and pipeline-driven, not transactional. Our incentive is to send our next cohort into a stronger market.

How to attend

If you are an employer hiring AI engineering talent, see for-employers and email founders@homemove.com with the role brief. We send invitations roughly four weeks before the day.

If you are an investor, email founders@homemove.com directly. We will share the cohort summary deck ahead of time so you can pre-screen which companies you want to spend lunch with.

If you are a parent or family member of a current student, you are invited automatically — your student will share the details closer to the day.

We will write a follow-up post within two weeks of the 27 November demo day with the actual outcomes: pitches, audience composition, conversations booked, and offers received. The honesty is part of the brand.

The first Moonlabs Academy demo day is on 3 September 2026 in Derby. The cohort applies before 5 June 2026 and starts on 15 June. The Academy page has the full curriculum and the for-employers page has the demo day invitation.