Build a startup. In twelve weeks.

Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who have raised £5m+ across Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. We have done the twelve-weeks-to-real-company arc multiple times in our own businesses — the pricing calls, the term-sheet edits, the back-of-the-envelope financial models. The Academy is twelve weeks of putting you through that exact arc with us in the room.

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. Most twelve-week startup courses teach the theory of starting a company; we compress the actual work into the same twelve weeks. The reason twelve weeks is enough now is the tooling — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex have collapsed the distance between idea and deployed product to the point that the bottleneck is the commercial work, not the code. By week six you have a paying pilot. By week twelve you have a real company, a deck, a model and a live investor pipeline. Some graduates raise; some hire; some join the Moonlabs portfolio as co-founders.