Build AI agents that actually work.
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. Agents run real production work across all three companies — lead triage, conveyancing pre-flights, listing generation, data enrichment. The patterns on this page are the ones that survive an actual production day at Homemove’s call volume, not a Twitter demo.
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. Agentic AI is the most hyped, least understood part of the current stack. A two-tool LangChain demo is one thing. An agent a real user pays to run, every day, without intervention — that is a different discipline entirely. Almost nothing on the internet teaches the production version. You leave the Academy with an agent in production, a paying pilot, and a credible founder shape — or a senior-AI-engineer offer from one of the agent-heavy AI-natives hiring this year.
Coding · agents at production fluency, end to end
Multi-step planning with retries, fallbacks and timeouts. Provider-native tool use (Claude, OpenAI Responses, Codex) and frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI) where they earn their place. Eval suites for every tool call from week one. Structured logs, traces, error budgets. Prompt-injection defence. Cost discipline. A deployed agent serving real users by week twelve.
Commercials · finding the buyer who pays for the agent
An agent without a buyer is a science project. You run the discovery calls. You write the one-page pilot. The agent replaces a real labour line on a real P&L. Pricing per workflow replaced, per opportunity created, per ticket deflected. A paid pilot by week six — the milestone that separates this course from every other agents tutorial on the internet.
Investment · raising on an agent that works
Sierra ($4.5bn customer-support agents), Cognition / Devin (SWE agent), Adept ($1bn before Amazon), Crew AI, Lindy $50m, Decagon $1.5bn, 11x $50m/Benchmark, /dev/agents (founded by Android co-creator) — agents are the loudest live thesis in venture. Cap table from week two, ten-slide deck, financial model, term sheets walked line by line. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
What agent frameworks do you teach?
Provider-native first — Claude with tool use, OpenAI Responses and Agents, Codex for software agents. Frameworks like LangGraph appear where they earn their place. The point is the underlying architecture, which transfers between stacks.
How do you handle the rate at which the model providers change everything?
The Academy is built around the durable skills — planning, evals, observability, review, deployment — which transfer cleanly between model and framework releases. We refresh the tooling each cohort.
Will I build a chatbot or a back-office agent?
Whichever your wedge is. Past projects have included sales-development agents, support agents, internal back-office automations, structured-output extractors, and chatbots. The pattern of work is the same; the deliverables differ.
What about evals?
Central, from week one. Every AI feature in your project ships behind an eval suite you wrote yourself. If you cannot tell whether your agent is getting better, you do not get to ship it.
I have built a small agent already. Is this still worth doing?
Yes — and bring it. We have had students arrive with a working prototype and leave with a paying SaaS that uses it. The course meets you where you are; the bar is the work you are willing to put in.
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 the agent you want to build and who would pay for it. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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