Learn Claude Code by running three live companies on it.
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, have raised £5m+ for their own companies, and have been AI-native since the week ChatGPT shipped. Claude Code is in our editor every day.
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. 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.
Almost every ‘learn Claude Code’ resource on the web is a fifteen-minute walkthrough. That gets you to hello-world. It does not get you to a deployed product, a paying customer, or the muscle memory to use the agent without it taking the wheel. The Academy is twelve weeks of using Claude Code in real production conditions on a project that has to ship.
Coding · Claude Code in production
Twelve weeks of agentic coding the way we ship at three live companies. Long-running tasks, real diffs, PR review. Cursor and Codex alongside. Evals from week one. A deployed product by week twelve.
Commercials · selling Claude-Code-built systems
Claude Code is the new high-leverage coding agent and SMBs are paying real money to have someone fluent in it ship for them. Pricing a Claude-Code-build retainer, the discovery call, a one-page pilot agreement, the first paying customer. A paid pilot by week six — for many graduates, a productised "AI engineering retainer" sold back into a network they already know.
Investment · raising on the Claude-built product wave
Anthropic itself ($61bn) is funding the surrounding ecosystem with the Anthropic Startup Program (credits + warm intros). Cursor ($2.5bn, defaults to Claude in many flows), Harvey ($1.5bn, runs on Claude), Replit Agent, Sourcegraph Cody, Granola, ChatPRD — the Claude-built fundraising thesis is now its own lane. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
Do I need experience with Claude Code before applying?
No. We will have you fluent in Claude Code within the first fortnight. The bar is that you must be willing to actually do the work — the tooling has made the on-ramp shorter than it has ever been.
How is this different from a Claude Code tutorial on YouTube?
A tutorial shows you the tool. The Academy hands you a real product to build, the production conditions to build it under, and the operators who have shipped £-revenue features with the same stack. The deliverable is a deployed business, not a finished video.
Is this an Anthropic course?
No. The Moonlabs Academy is an independent twelve-week vocational course. We use Claude Code (and Cursor, and Codex when it fits) because it is what we use to run our own companies — not because Anthropic asked us to.
What stack will I learn alongside Claude Code?
Postgres, modern web frameworks (Laravel + Blade, Next.js where appropriate), structured logs, Sentry, evals, deploy pipelines, billing, auth. The same stack used across the Moonlabs portfolio.
Is the course in person or remote?
In person, in Derby. Twelve students, twelve weeks. The case for sitting next to senior operators five days a week is the case for the Academy.
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 Claude Code today and what you would ship. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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