From application to round close.
Five stages. No 14-stage bureaucracy. Most founders go from first form to signed agreement in under three weeks, and from signing to first investor conversation inside ninety days.
Apply
A short form. Not a pitch deck. Tell us what you are trying to build, who you are building it for, and what you have already tried. If you are stuck on framing, write it the way you would explain it to a friend at the pub.
No demo required. No financial model required. We will ask for those in stage three if we get there.
Review + first call
James and Louis read every application personally. If there is a wedge worth pulling on, we book a thirty-minute call to dig in. If we cannot help, we say so the same week and tell you who might.
About one in seven applications gets a first call. About one in three first calls turns into stage three.
Diligence + sign
A second call to test the wedge, a brief technical review, and a candid conversation about runway and timing. If both sides want to proceed, we sign a short agreement and you pay the £999 commitment fee.
The £999 is credited back in full against the 10% success fee when the round closes. If you raise, it costs you nothing on net.
Build together
We architect the product, build the production foundations, write the early evals, and ship the first customer-facing version. You operate the company; we operate alongside you in the same channels and on the same cadence.
Weekly check-in, daily Slack, ad-hoc pair sessions on the hard problems. James and Louis on the build, not a junior associate.
Investor process + round close
When the product is real and the early customer story is in place, we open the doors. Warm introductions to operators and HNWIs in our network. We rehearse the pitch. We sit in on the awkward second meetings. The round closes when it is ready, not when a calendar says so.
On round close, the 10% success fee is invoiced (with the £999 commitment fee already netted off). The 1% tech-for-equity is recorded against the new cap table.
Stage 3 · The fee
What the £999 commitment buys.
Paid once on signing the Incubator agreement. Credited back in full against the 10% success fee when the round closes — so if you raise, it costs you nothing on net. The fee exists to make signing a serious moment for both sides.
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Diligence on the company (cap table review, technical review, market positioning) -
Shaping of the wedge before any build begins -
First round of investor introductions and the written-up intro note for our network
Read the longer reasoning: why we charge a commitment fee at all.
Sharp wedge. Real builder.
A specific wedge
One thing a specific buyer will pay for. Not a platform, not an ecosystem. We help you cut it down further.
A founder who builds
Technical depth helps, but what we really back is taste. You should be the kind of person who already opens the laptop on a Sunday.
A market that scales
Lifestyle businesses are great. We back the ones that could plausibly become big. Honest no on either side if not.
Process FAQ.
How long does the whole process take?
Form submission to signed agreement is typically two to three weeks. Signing to first shipped customer-facing build is around four to six weeks. Signing to investor process opening is roughly twelve weeks. Round close depends on the round; median has been four to six months from open.
Do you sign NDAs at the application stage?
No. We read hundreds of applications and signing NDAs at that stage would slow us to a crawl. We sign mutual NDA at stage three when diligence begins. We have never used anything in an application against an applicant, and we are not going to start.
Can I apply if I have a co-founder?
Yes. Co-founder pairs are common. We will want to meet both of you on the first call. We have written about what we look for in a pair: see "what we look for in a co-founder pair" in Field Notes.
Can I apply if I have already raised money?
Yes, with caveats. If your round is already partially closed, we will want to understand the cap table and the existing investors before signing. We do not have a hard cutoff but the structure works best for genuinely pre-seed companies.
What happens if we sign and it does not work out?
It has happened. If we mutually decide to part ways before round close, the £999 commitment fee has paid for the diligence and introductions we have done. The 1% tech-for-equity is unwound if the build did not produce code we shipped. The 10% success fee never triggers because no round closes.
Do you accept applications from outside the UK?
Yes, but most of what we do requires founders to be physically present in Derby for blocks of building. If you are based abroad, expect to be in the UK roughly 8-10 weeks across the engagement.
Is the £999 negotiable?
Rarely. We have made exceptions twice for founders with strong applications who genuinely could not absorb it, and both times the conversation that surfaced the constraint was useful. If it is the obstacle, email us and we will talk.
Ready when you are.
The form is fifteen minutes. The first call is thirty. From there it moves at the speed both sides want.
Apply to MoonlabsRead the thinking.
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Tell us about the company you want to build. If we’re a fit, we’ll get back within a week.
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