Enrico Milletti is the Founder and CEO of Silica, a San Francisco robotics company that designs and manufactures affordable actuators that sense forces directly. Silica is part of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch and is also backed by Founders, Inc.

Enrico studied visual arts and engineering at Oberlin College, where he won the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. He worked at Material Connexion, then served as founding engineer at Artefact, building the first desktop manufacturing cell for resin transfer molding, and later developed novel materials and manufacturing processes for future products at Apple.

Enrico blends art and engineering, drawing on design, materials and manufacturing to build robotic hardware. He believes that once robots can feel, they can start learning the way humans do.

Silica is backed by Y Combinator, Founders, Inc. and UP.Partners, and has raised $125K. Enrico leads the company as a solo founder and is taking pre-orders and inquiries from teams that use servos or actuators.

Silica's self-sensing actuators detect forces down to 1 gram, roughly 50x finer than most actuators today. Its goal is to make force sensing a standard feature in robotics rather than a costly add-on.