How to build an AI startup.
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 have done the wedge-product-pilot-deck-raise arc multiple times in our own businesses — the playbook on this page is the one we use, not theory.
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. Half the writing on the internet about building an AI startup is hype, and the other half is theory. The actual playbook is short: pick a wedge a real buyer will pay for, build the smallest defensible version with AI tooling, run five real discovery calls, reprice, sign a paid pilot, write a deck, raise, ship more, repeat. Each sentence hides a decade of operator judgment. You leave the Academy with the entire arc walked — not read about.
Coding · the smallest defensible AI product, shipped
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex on real frameworks. Agents, retrieval, evals, deploy pipelines. Wedge-first — the smallest version a real buyer would pay for, not the maximalist version a Twitter thread would clap for. A deployed AI product by week twelve.
Commercials · the discovery calls, repriced, paid
Five real discovery calls with real buyers by week three, run live with us in the room. Repricing after every round. A one-page pilot agreement. A paid pilot by week six — the single most predictive milestone for whether the startup ever raises or scales.
Investment · the round, not the wish-list
Cap table from week two, ten-slide deck, financial model that survives diligence, fifty plausible investors curated, term sheets walked line by line. Warm introductions where we have them. A live investor pipeline by demo day. Some Academy graduates close inside the next quarter; others join the Moonlabs portfolio as co-founders.
Common questions.
Do I need an idea before I apply?
Helpful but not required. We pressure-test the wedge in week one and reshape it as buyer conversations come in. If you do not have one yet, we will help you find one inside the first fortnight.
Do I need a co-founder?
Not to apply. Many strong students arrive solo and find a co-founder inside the cohort or the wider Moonlabs network. Some apply as pairs. Both shapes work.
How much money do I need to start?
Effectively none for the product itself — AI tooling, £20 a month in API credits, and the engineering work you will do during the cohort gets you to a deployed product. The Academy tuition (£6,000) is the meaningful cost.
Is this an accelerator?
No — we do not invest at this stage. We prepare you for the round. Some Academy graduates go on to join the Moonlabs Incubator afterwards, which is the accelerator-shaped step.
What about the AI part specifically — what kind of startup is right?
Wedges that use AI as a core feature, sold to a buyer who will pay because the AI does work they otherwise have to do themselves. Wrapper-only or thin-wrapper startups are a hard sell to investors and to customers in 2026; we will pressure-test yours against that bar early.
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.
How To Find A Co Founder UK
How To Pitch An AI Startup
How To Build An AI Moat
How To Launch An AI Product
How To Price An AI Product
How To Raise For An AI Startup
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us what you would build and who would pay for it. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
© 2026 Moonlabs Incubator. All rights reserved.