A School of Code alternative. Operator-led, in the Midlands.
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 the Midlands. We respect the West Midlands tech scene SoC helped build and we have hired engineers who came up through it. The honest comparison on this page is the version we would give a Birmingham candidate considering both.
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 School of Code has done real work in the West Midlands tech scene, particularly on inclusion. The publicly-funded, free-to-students model has placed candidates the rest of the market would have skipped. The Academy is deliberately a different shape: paid (£6,000), small cohort (twelve), operator-led, AI-native, three-pillar. You leave the Academy with a deployed AI product, paying pilots and a fundraising arc — the artefact a junior-software-engineer pipeline structurally cannot produce.
Coding · AI-native, not a 2018 software track
School of Code teaches software engineering with AI as a topic on a sixteen-week syllabus designed before frontier AI existed. The Academy puts Cursor, Claude Code and Codex at the centre of the editor and the curriculum — production retrieval, agents, evals, observability, deploy pipelines. A deployed AI product by week twelve.
Commercials · operator outcomes, not a junior pipeline
School of Code’s strongest outcome is a junior dev placement at a UK SME. The Academy’s strongest outcome is a paid pilot signed inside the cohort, sometimes back to a Birmingham SME the student already knows. A paid pilot by week six — the milestone that separates an operator artefact from a placement artefact.
Investment · the founder option a free programme skips
SoC produces hireable juniors; the Academy produces founders who raise. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. Bursaries and reduced-rate seats considered case by case for hardship; otherwise £6,000 tuition with Apprenticeship Levy, L&D budgets and employer-sponsorship all accepted. A live investor pipeline by demo day — with warm introductions to the Midlands angel network (Midlands Engine, ART Business Loans, Birmingham angel network, Mercia).
Common questions.
Is this an anti-SoC page?
No. School of Code has done good work, particularly on inclusion. Several engineers we respect came up through it. This page exists because the question of which Midlands bootcamp is right in 2026 is a real one, and we want to answer it honestly.
School of Code is free. Why would I pay for the Academy?
Honest answer: if free is the deciding constraint, School of Code is the right answer. If the deciding constraint is the artefact at the end — a deployed AI product, paying customers, an operator network — the Academy is the better return for the £6,000 spent.
Is the Moonlabs Academy as inclusive as School of Code?
Different model, similar values where we can deliver them. We accept candidates based on willingness and fit, not background; we offer reduced-rate places case by case for hardship cases; we accept bursaries, scholarships, employer funding and apprenticeship routes. We do not pretend to match the publicly-funded inclusive-by-design SoC model.
Can I do School of Code first and then the Academy?
Yes — several past students have. SoC builds the engineering foundation, the Academy adds AI-native fluency, commercials and investment exposure. The two are complementary.
How do the geographies compare? I am in Birmingham.
School of Code is in Birmingham itself. Derby is an hour up the line from Birmingham New Street — reachable, but a meaningful commute. The Birmingham landing page covers this.
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 which Midlands programmes you have considered. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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