Build websites with AI. The engineering version.
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. All three are custom-built web products on Laravel + Blade or Next.js, shipped with Cursor and Claude Code in the editor. The site you are reading right now is the same stack.
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. A no-code AI website builder is a fine way to get to a landing page; it is not a way to learn to build the web. The difference shows the first time you need auth, a database, a custom integration, or a workflow no template anticipated. The Academy is the engineering version — AI does the keyboard work, you do the thinking. You leave with a fully custom site shipped on infrastructure you understand — or as the founder of a productised “custom websites, AI-built” agency.
Coding · the engineer’s AI web stack, end to end
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex on Laravel + Blade or Next.js, Tailwind, Postgres + pgvector, Stripe, modern deploy pipelines. Live site on a real domain behind CI/CD with structured logs and Sentry by week two. A deployed, fully-custom site with auth, billing and integrations by week twelve.
Commercials · selling custom-built sites as a service
AI-native web shops are charging £3-15k for sites that genuinely beat the agencies on speed and the no-code tools on flexibility. Pricing the build, the discovery call, a one-page agreement, the first paying customer. A paid project by week six — the cleanest founder-to-cashflow path on the Academy menu.
Investment · raising on AI web infrastructure
Vercel ($3.25bn), v0 by Vercel, Lovable ($200m+), Bolt.new, Magic, Framer, Webstudio, Builder.io, Wasp, Pyrra — AI-native web tooling is one of the densest funded categories of the cycle. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
How is this different from learning a no-code AI website builder?
A no-code builder hides the underlying engineering. We expose it. The skills you learn here transfer to any web stack and any AI tool; the skills you learn in a no-code builder transfer to one product.
I am a designer / marketer / non-engineer. Is this for me?
Yes, provided you are willing to actually engineer. We have taken non-engineers through the course before. The AI tooling has collapsed the distance, but the curiosity has to come from you.
What kinds of sites do students build?
Whatever the wedge is. Past projects have included SaaS dashboards, marketplaces, content sites, conversational interfaces, and internal tools. The constraint is “real users will pay for it”, not a particular shape.
Will I learn design as well as engineering?
You will learn enough design taste and Tailwind fluency to make your site look like a real product. We do not pretend to turn you into a design lead in twelve weeks, but the bar for shipping is “not embarrassing in front of investors” and we hit it consistently.
What about hosting and ops?
Covered. By week three you understand DNS, deployment, environment variables, logs, alerts, and database backups. The site is yours afterwards — we do not lock you to our infrastructure.
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 site you would ship first and who would pay for it. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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