Meet the team engineering the future

Artem Sokolov

CEO and Founder

Artem Sokolov turned a small family manufacturing business into a billion-dollar enterprise and now leads Humanoid, a robotics company building safe, commercially scalable robots to work alongside people. Recognized with the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2021, Artem brings a global perspective to team building and business growth. Before launching Humanoid, he spent over a decade expanding operations and revenue, combining operational discipline with a sense of purpose.

At Humanoid, Artem has assembled a team of 160 professionals with deep experience in robotics hardware, machine learning, control systems, and deployment. In just one year, he opened offices in London, Boston, and Vancouver, pushing forward the company’s technology and delivery capacity.

Artem holds an Executive Certificate in AI and Digital Business Excellence from IMD. His style is fast but thoughtful, much like his rally driving: full focus, full speed, and the judgment to brake when needed. When away from work, he’s either chasing snow, surf, or his pilot’s license. Ideally, all three.

Artem’s goals are a bit simpler: keep learning, keep building, and ideally, finish that pilot license so he can skip traffic altogether.

Jarad Cannon

Chief Technology Officer

With over 13 years in robotics and AI, Jarad Cannon has led multiple zero-to-one programs and helped turn early ideas into mobile robots used across global commercial and consumer markets. He brings hands-on experience in autonomous mobile robot (AMR) deployments, mobile platforms, and scaling of both hardware and software systems.

Before joining Humanoid, Jarad was CTO at Brain Corp, where he helped grow the company from 5 to over 40,000 deployed robots and expanded the team from 30 to 250 people. He led the launch of 13 different robots, mostly in commercial floorcare and inventory tracking. Earlier, he spent six years at iRobot as a software engineer working on telepresence platforms, defense and reconnaissance robots, and advanced mapping and cleaning behaviors for Roomba.

At Humanoid, Jarad leads technical development across disciplines, bringing together hardware, software, and strategy to build robots that move from demo to deployment. He focuses on systems that perform in the real world from day one, not just in the lab.

Jarad holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire. He believes the most honest feedback comes from the field and that a robot’s best feature is its reliability under pressure.

Jarad has spent much of his career building machines for situations where people shouldn’t go, something he’s genuinely proud of. From systems used to inspect suspicious packages to modified robots that entered disaster zones, his work has helped keep humans out of harm’s way. 

Outside work, he’s a curious traveler, longtime gamer, and early believer in AI’s potential. His motto: take charge of your life and live it to the fullest.

Sotirios Stasinopoulos

Chief Product Officer

Sotirios Stasinopoulos speaks robot in three languages: engineering, entrepreneurship, and world delivery. With more than 18 years in robotics and AI, he has worked on humanoid and wheeled robots, cloud-based control systems, and intelligent platforms designed for everyday use.

He holds a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and a Ph.D. in Automation and Robotics from Tsinghua University. Before joining Humanoid, he was Product Director at UBTECH Robotics, where he led development of larger humanoids for industrial, service, and home environments. Earlier, he worked on autonomous vehicles and bipedal systems as both a perception engineer and R&D team lead.

Sotirios spent over 13 years in China, working across the local tech ecosystem and building cooperation between Chinese and Western companies. He also founded two robotics startups: one focused on pet companion robots, the other on online education and evaluation for robotics and AI.

At Humanoid, Sotirios leads product development for next-generation humanoid robots. His focus is on translating research into systems that deliver results on the ground. His proudest achievement so far is helping take the Wheeled Alpha robot from planning to reality in just eight months.

Outside of work, Sotirios enjoys travel, fitness, anime, board games, and video games. His motto: work hard, play harder.

Alina Kolpakova

Chief Strategy Officer

Alina Kolpakova leads corporate strategy, marketing, commercialization, and go-to-market at Humanoid. She shaped the company’s vision long before it had a name, drawing from extensive experience in planning, analytics, and early-stage ventures. Her background includes over eight years at Sokolov Jewelry, where she worked alongside Artem Sokolov and helped grow the business across international markets.

In 2019, she became Director of Analytics at Artem’s venture incubator, where she explored emerging sectors including blockchain, SaaS, and AI. Her early research into logistics and automation laid the foundation for what became Humanoid in 2024. Alina led the company’s market studies, technology assessments, and use case validation, helping move it from concept to traction.

Today, she translates market signals into business direction, keeping development grounded in practical needs. Alina holds an MBA from IE Business School and is known internally for her speed. A friction point becomes a spreadsheet, becomes a recommendation, fast.

Outside work, she reads finance textbooks for fun, experiments with extreme fasting, and sometimes convinces friends to run a marathon. 

Jochen Rudat

Chief Growth & Revenue Officer

Jochen Rudat leads growth, sales, and customer partnerships at Humanoid. He brings more than a decade of experience at Tesla, where he worked directly under Elon Musk and helped scale operations across Europe from the ground up. He played a central role in launching the German market, turning a single Roadster delivery into a billion-dollar region, and later helped steer the company’s China turnaround. He also led the internal push to build the European Gigafactory, aligning stakeholders and helping get construction underway.

Since Tesla, Jochen has advised startups across tech and mobility, helping them turn complex ideas into working products and traction. His background is in business and technology management, but his strength is solving problems under pressure, whether that means building go-to-market teams or challenging top-level decisions when needed.

At Humanoid, Jochen focuses on commercial results: shaping revenue strategy, running pilots, and building partnerships that get robots into use. He believes in testing early, learning fast, and letting results shape the next step.

He holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences and an MBA. Outside of work, he’s a black belt in judo, a former youth national team athlete, and a father who’s often outplayed at family board games. Since 2015, he has driven only electric vehicles and recently shifted his focus from motors to longevity, trading late-night snacks for early-morning workouts.

His mindset blends clear thinking with follow-through: question assumptions, rebuild from the ground up, and show up. For him, leadership is not about a title. It’s about being there and doing the work.

Boris Yangel

Head of AI

Boris Yangel brings more than 17 years of experience in solving problems using machine learning and deep learning. He has worked across a wide variety of domains, including image search, self-driving cars, protein-ligand interactions, voice assistants and LLM-based agents. 

Before joining the team, he held the position of Head of AI at Nebius, one of the world’s leading AI infrastructure companies. At Humanoid, he leads the development of the company’s end-to-end AI systems, driving capabilities in perception, decision-making, and human-robot interaction.

Dmitrii Rudnitckii

VP, Robotic Platform & Applications

Dmitrii Rudnitckii brings more than 25 years of experience across robotics, AI, and autonomous systems, with work spanning telecom, banking, and manufacturing. At Humanoid, he leads platform and applications development, bringing together perception, control, and motion into a unified system. His focus is to make robots that don’t just look ready but actually get the job done.

Before joining Humanoid, Dmitrii helped build an autonomous EV factory at ARRIVAL, introduced predictive systems at Nokia, and implemented fraud detection for a major Baltic bank. He also led the digital overhaul of a national postal service with over 300,000 employees, rebuilding systems from logistics to customer interfaces in just three years.

He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science, Control, and Data Processing from Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation and an MBA from The Open University.

Dmitrii is hands-on and deeply practical. Code isn’t finished until it moves something. At home, he restores auction finds in his garage and has built every table in the house himself. He lives with three kids, two cats, one overexcited dog, and a tank of calm fish. His motto: never give up, just keep going.

Thomas Shepherd

Chief Operation Officer

With over 15 years of experience, my expertise spans operational excellence, digital hardware design and manufacturing, technology management, and organizational governance. As the VP of Operational Excellence at Arrival’s AME division, Thomas led the team through formation, scaling, funding adjustments, program pivots, and daily operations.

Andrey Shelomentsev

Chief Business Development Officer

Bringing over a decade of experience with leading automotive and deep-tech companies such as Arrival, Jaguar Land Rover, and WayRay, Andrew leads the introduction and adoption of humanoid robots through strategic partnerships, business development, and collaboration.

Natalia Zhoykina

Chief HR Officer

Bringing experience from previous roles at Soveren, Trucker Path, UbankSA, and Deutsche Bank, Natalia is developing all People 
processes (recruiting, HR, performance management, and more) at Humanoid.