An Entrepreneur First alternative. For AI-native founders.
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 have raised £5m+ across Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. We did not do EF; we built the companies and the cap table the long way round. The shape on this page is the alternative we wish had existed in 2019.
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. Honest credit where it is due: Entrepreneur First and Antler have produced some serious UK companies (Cleo, Tractable, Aztec, Magic Pony, Permutive, Omnipresent, Vertice, Borderless). The talent-investor model has worked. The Academy is deliberately a different shape — product first not pairing first, tuition not equity, twelve students not fifty, Derby not Old Street. You leave the Academy with the artefacts (deployed product + paid pilot + deck + model) that EF would have asked for at month six — without giving up the 10% slice of your company. Deeper essay here.
Coding · product first, partner second
EF pairs you with a co-founder and then iterates the idea, with the product still on paper until month three. We build the product around your wedge in week one and let the partner (or solo) shape come from that. Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, agents, retrieval, evals, deploy. A deployed AI product by week twelve.
Commercials · £6k tuition, no 10% equity hit
EF takes ~10% in exchange for the stipend and the programme. The Academy is £6,000 tuition — your cap table stays clean until the round you choose to run. Pricing, discovery, paid pilot by week six. The same artefact, ten percent more of your company kept.
Investment · the route, not the cheque
EF invests at the end; we get you to a position to raise — from UK angels, the UK funds we know personally (Plural, Local Globe, Concrete VC, Pi Labs, Notion Capital, Forward Partners, Backed VC, Octopus, Hoxton), or from the Moonlabs Incubator as the equity-shaped step in our own ecosystem. A live investor pipeline by demo day, with you holding more of the company than an EF graduate would.
Common questions.
Is Entrepreneur First a bad option?
No — for the right founder it is excellent. The honest reason to look elsewhere is shape: EF puts cofounder-pairing and idea-discovery at the centre, takes equity, runs in London (or Berlin / Bangalore / Paris), and the cohort is much larger. If those constraints fit your situation, do EF.
I applied to EF and was rejected. Is the Academy a sensible next step?
Often yes — rejection from EF is usually about fit rather than ability. The Academy is a different programme shape and a meaningful proportion of past Academy applicants have included strong EF-rejections.
I am between EF and Antler. How do I choose?
Honest answer: shape and geography. Antler is similar to EF in mechanism (cofounder pairing, equity), broader geographic spread. Pick whichever you can physically be in for the duration.
What if I already have a co-founder?
The Academy welcomes co-founder pairs — EF specifically does not, since the programme is built around pairing you. If you arrive paired and AI-native, the Academy is structurally a better fit.
Do you invest in companies that come out of the Academy?
Not as the Academy itself. The Moonlabs Incubator is the investment-shaped step, and a subset of strong Academy graduates go on to join it.
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 with your idea, whether you arrive solo or paired, and which programmes you have looked at. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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