A coding bootcamp. For 2026, not 2018.
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 from Derby. We have hired bootcamp graduates and we have hired Russell Group CS leavers and we know exactly what 2026 hiring managers ask for. The honest case on this page is the one we make when a friend asks where to send their son or daughter.
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. The classic UK coding bootcamp model — twelve weeks of Rails or React, a graduation party, a job board — was built for 2018. A junior engineer in 2026 who cannot drive Cursor, Claude Code and Codex is a junior engineer in name only, no matter how clean the JavaScript. You leave the Academy with a deployed product, a paid pilot, and either a senior-band engineering offer or the wedge to co-found something — the outcome a 2026 bootcamp should produce, not the 2018 one.
Coding · AI-native, not AI-curious
Cursor, Claude Code and Codex are your editor — not a tab you flip to. Auth, billing, Postgres + pgvector, deploys, structured logs, agents, retrieval, evals, observability. The unsexy stuff a 2018 bootcamp skipped, and the reason its graduates struggled in real teams. A deployed AI product by week twelve on a real domain, with real users.
Commercials · the half a 2018 bootcamp skipped
Five live discovery calls by week three. Pricing pushed against real buyer reactions. A one-page pilot agreement. The first paying customer. Bootcamps graduate junior engineers; the Academy graduates operators with a paid invoice in hand. A paid pilot by week six — a different artefact entirely.
Investment · the founder route, not just a junior CV
Bootcamps graduate to grad-scheme job boards. The Academy graduates to senior-AI offers at AI-native employers (Anthropic, Cohere, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Faculty AI, Sierra, Hebbia) or to a credible seed-round founder shape. Cap table from week two, ten-slide deck, financial model. Warm introductions to the East Midlands angel network (Midlands Engine, ART Business Loans). A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
How is this different from a classic coding bootcamp?
A classic bootcamp teaches you a syntax in twelve weeks. We teach you the craft in twelve weeks — agentic coding, evals, deploys, plus the commercials and investment work that turns a product into a business. The output is a shipped company, not a graduate-job CV.
Will I learn a specific language and stack?
Modern web stacks — typically Laravel + Blade or Next.js depending on the project — Postgres, Tailwind. Stack is matched to your project; the durable skills carry across.
I am at university right now. Should I drop out for this?
Almost never. Several students do the Academy on a sandwich year or during the summer, with their university aware. Honest conversation on the first call about what fits your specific situation.
Is there a job guarantee?
No, and we will not promise one — anyone who does, in a bootcamp context, is lying to you. What we will promise is that no graduate has left without options: hired into the Moonlabs portfolio, hired into our network, or co-founding a next-batch incubator company.
What does it cost?
Tuition is £6,000 for the twelve weeks. Bursaries, scholarships, employer funding and apprenticeship routes accepted. Materially cheaper than a London bootcamp; materially better outcomes than the ones we have benchmarked against.
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 where you are starting from and what you would build with Cursor and Claude Code on your first day. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
© 2026 Moonlabs Incubator. All rights reserved.