Build a chatbot customers will pay for.
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. Customer-support chatbots, conveyancing assistants and lead-qualification bots are real production surfaces for us — the failure-mode design on this page is the work we have already done at our own customer volume, not pages from a tutorial.
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. Anyone can wrap an LLM and call it a chatbot; almost nobody can ship one a business will pay for. The gap is retrieval, evals, guardrails, observability, billing, and the commercial work to find a buyer in the first place. None of that fits in a weekend tutorial. You leave the Academy with a chatbot in production for paying users — or as the founder of a chatbot product that does not look like the eighteenth one on Product Hunt this week.
Coding · the production chatbot stack, end to end
RAG done properly, tool-using agents that handle multi-step workflows, evals from week one gated in CI, observability, billing, auth, Sentry, structured logs, prompt-injection defence. A deployed chatbot taking real conversations by week twelve — not a Streamlit demo, not a screenshot.
Commercials · chatbots as a productised offer
Every SMB on the planet has thought about "ChatGPT for our customer support" and most have stalled at procurement. Pricing per active conversation, per resolved ticket, or as a seat retainer. Discovery, a one-page pilot, the first paying customer. A paid pilot by week six — one of the easiest concrete-ROI AI offers an SMB will sign.
Investment · raising on a chatbot product
Sierra ($4.5bn, customer-support agents), Ada ($1.2bn), Decagon ($1.5bn), Cohere’s North enterprise chatbot, Forethought, Ultimate.ai (acquired by Zendesk), Klarna’s in-house bot — chatbot infrastructure and customer-support AI is one of the densest funded vertical-AI categories in venture. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
Do I need machine learning experience?
No. Almost no useful chatbot in 2026 is being built by training a model from scratch. The job is engineering on top of frontier models, and that is what we teach.
What model providers do you cover?
Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, and open-weight models where they fit. The course is provider-agnostic — the architecture, evals and deployment lessons hold regardless of which API you call.
Will I learn agents and tool use?
Yes. Multi-step agents and tool use are a central part of the syllabus. Most production chatbots that move money are agentic — we treat them that way.
Will my chatbot have real users by the end of the course?
Yes, if you do the work. Week three is the “first five conversations” milestone where you run discovery calls with real buyers; week six is the first paid commitment. By week twelve, paying users.
Can I build a chatbot for my existing business?
Yes — it is one of the most common shapes the course takes. If you already have a business, the wedge work in week one is faster, and the commercial calls go to your existing pipeline.
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 chatbot you would build and who would pay for it. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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