In August 2025 Artem Sokolov sold the thing his family had spent three decades building. The jewellery brand that carried his surname, and the chain of shops behind it, went to the Russian investor Anton Pak, according to the newspaper Kommersant. The terms were not disclosed.
He had grown up inside that business. Born in Russia, he was the son of the couple who started the Sokolov jewellery brand in 1993, and he later became its chief executive. Four years before the sale he had even discussed a joint New York and Moscow listing aimed at raising US$500 million, Reuters reported. A public offering was the obvious next chapter for a family company like his.
The part that ties them together is KinetIQ, software that lets several robots share one job and hand work to each other.
Instead he bet on something with no jewellery in it at all. In 2024 he founded a robotics company in London, known by its legal name SKL Robotics and by its brand, Humanoid. He is listed as its sole owner, and Forbes Argentina reported that he put in about US$30 million of his own money before anyone else wrote a cheque. That is a founder choosing to be the first and only investor in a field where rivals such as Tesla and Figure AI had a long head start and far deeper pockets.
What the sale of the family firm bought him was time. The early months were visible mostly through videos. In January 2026 a Humanoid robot tried, a little clumsily, to move a box for Siemens, and the clip made the rounds.
The company built two bodies for its robots, a wheeled one for sorting and carrying, and a bipedal one for cramped, cluttered spaces, together called HMND 01. The part that ties them together is KinetIQ, software that lets several robots share one job and hand work to each other.
The turn came in May 2026, when Humanoid signed a binding deal with the German industrial group Schaeffler to deploy between 1,000 and 2,000 wheeled units across its plants by 2032. A real customer with real volume changed the conversation with investors. In July, Prime Movers Lab led a US$152 million Series A at a US$1.35 billion post-money valuation, with Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital and Aglae Ventures joining. Total funding stood near US$270 million. Bosch is to act as contract manufacturer, which matters because the hard problem now is building thousands of robots, not one.
Sokolov called the company Europe's first pure-play humanoid unicorn, reached in about two years.
The human lesson is in the order of events. He sold the safe, inherited asset first, and only then asked others to back the new one. Investors tend to believe a founder more when the founder has already paid for the idea himself.