How this founder’s unlikely path to Silicon Valley could become an edge in industrial tech

Thomas Lee Young doesn’t seem like your typical Silicon Valley founder.

The 24-year-old CEO of Interface, a San Francisco startup that uses AI to prevent industrial accidents, is a white guy with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese surname, a combination he finds amusing enough to mention when first introduced to business contacts. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, the site of substantial oil and gas exploration activity, Young grew up around oil rigs and energy infrastructure as his entire family worked as engineers, going back generations to his great-grandfather who immigrated to the island nation from China.

That background has become his calling card in pitch meetings with oil and gas executives today, but it’s much more than a great conversation starter; It outlines a path that is fairly straightforward and Young might argue that this gives the interface an edge.

It took years to build. From the age of 11, Young focused on Caltech with the same intensity as anyone much older. He watched online shows about Silicon Valley and became fascinated by the idea that people could create “anything and everything” in America. He did everything he could to secure admission, even writing his application essay about hijacking his family’s Roomba to create a 3D spatial map of his home.

The ploy worked — Caltech accepted him in 2020 — but then came COVID-19, and so did its effects. For one thing, Young’s visa situation became nearly impossible (visa appointments were canceled and processing halted). At the same time, his college fund, which had been carefully built up to $350,000 over six or seven years to cover his education, was “basically wiped out” by a sudden market downturn in March of that year.

Without much time to decide about his future, he chose a cheaper three-year engineering program to study mechanical engineering at the University of Bristol in the UK, but never gave up on his dreams of Silicon Valley. “I was devastated, but I realized I could still do something,” he says.

In Bristol, Young landed at Jaguar Land Rover, working in something called human factors engineering – essentially the UX and safety design of industrial systems. “I had never heard of it before I joined,” he admits. The role involved figuring out how to make cars and manufacturing lines as safe as possible, ensuring they were “dummy proof” for smooth operation.

It was here, inside heavy industry, that Young saw the problem that would become the interface. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety documentation either don’t exist – pen and paper – or are so siled and poorly designed that employees hate them. What’s worse, operating procedures – the instruction manuals and checklists that blue-collar workers rely on to stay safe – are full of errors, out of date and nearly impossible to maintain.

Young urged Jaguar to allow him to create a solution, but the company was not interested. So he started plotting his way out. When he learned about Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator that recruits promising individuals even before they have a co-founder or idea, he did not apply despite a 1% acceptance rate. He was essentially accepted to pitch himself.

He told Jaguar he was going to a wedding in Trinidad and would be away for a week. Instead, he went through the EF selection process, impressed the organizers and quit the job the day he returned to the office. “They realized, ‘Oh, so you probably weren’t at the wedding,'” he laughs.

At EF, Young met his future co-founder and CTO Aryan Mehta. Of Indian origin but born in Belgium, Mehta’s American dream had failed. She was accepted to both Georgia Tech and Penn, but similarly couldn’t get a visa appointment during COVID. He studied mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, where he developed AI for fault detection, before building a machine learning pipeline at Amazon.

“We had similar backgrounds,” says Young. “He’s super international. He speaks five languages, very technical, amazing guy, and we got along very well.” Young says, in fact, they were the only team in their EF group that didn’t fall apart.

What’s more, today, they live together in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood, though when asked about spending so much time together, Young is adamant that it’s not an issue given their respective workloads. “In the past week, I have seen [Aaryan] Maybe at home for 30 minutes total.”

In fact, the pitch for what they’re building is simple: Use AI to make heavy industry safer. The company autonomously audits operating processes using large language models, cross-checking them against regulations, technical drawings and corporate policies to catch errors that could – in the worst case scenario – kill workers.

Some numbers are being arrested. For one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is now deployed at three sites (Young declined to name the brand), Interface’s software found 10,800 errors and corrected the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. As Young explained, the same work done manually would cost more than $35 million and take two to three years.

One error that Young found particularly troubling, he says, was a document that had been in circulation for 10 years with the wrong pressure range listed for the valve. “They’re lucky nothing happened,” says Medha Agarwal, partner at Defy.vc, who led Interface’s $3.5 million seed round earlier this year with participation from angel investors including Precursor, Rockyard Ventures and Charlie Songhurst.

The contracts are worth considering. After initially trying outcomes-based pricing (the energy company “hated it,” Young says), Interface adopted a hybrid per-seat model with higher costs. A single contract with a Canadian energy company is worth more than $2.5 million annually, and Interface has more fuel and oil service customers coming online in Houston, Guyana and Brazil.

The total addressable market is not entirely clear, but it is not small either. According to market research organization IBISWorld, there are approximately 27,000 oil and gas service companies in the US alone, and this is the first vertical the interface wants to tackle.

outsider’s edge

Interestingly, Young’s age and background – things that might seem like disadvantages when it comes to more established industries – have become her secret weapons. When he walks into a room of executives two or three times his age, there is initial skepticism, he says. “Who is this young man and how does he know what he is talking about?”

But then, he says, he delivers his “wow moment” by explaining his operations, his employees’ daily routines, and his understanding of exactly how much time and money the interface can save them. “Once you can turn them around, they’ll absolutely love you and advocate for you and fight for you,” he says. (He claims that after a recent first site visit with operators, five employees asked when they could invest in the interface, which made him especially proud, since field staff generally “hate software providers.”)

Indeed, although Young works out of Interface’s office in San Francisco’s Financial District, his hard hat sits on a table a few blocks away from his desk, ready for the next site visit. (Agarwal suggests Young should use a little more free time in his life, recalling a recent call where Young told him he hadn’t seen the sun all day.)

The company now has eight employees – five in the office, three remote – mostly engineering staff, plus an operations person who just started this week. Interface’s biggest challenge is hiring fast enough to meet demand, a problem that requires its small team to tap networks in both Europe and the US.

As for what Young makes of the life he wanted and now lives in San Francisco, he’s surprised at how accurate the Silicon Valley stereotypes turned out to be. “You see people online talking about, ‘Oh, you go to a park and the guy sitting next to you has raised $50 million by building some crazy AI agent.’ But that’s just the way it really is,” he says. “I wonder what life was like in Trinidad. I mention these ideas to people at home, and they don’t believe me.”

He sometimes takes time to go out in nature with friends — he says they recently went to Tahoe — and Interface hosts events like a hackathon they held last weekend. But mostly, it’s work, and that work involves AI, just like everyone else in San Francisco is doing right now.

Which makes trips to oil rigs strangely fascinating.

Actually, that hard hat at the office isn’t just a practical necessity; Young suggests that this is also a temptation. For engineers tired of building “some low-impact B2B sales or recruiting tool,” as Young puts it, the promise of occasionally leaving the Bay Area bubble to work with operators in the field has become a recruiting advantage. He notes that less than 1% of San Francisco startups work in heavy industry, and that scarcity is part of the appeal for him and the people he’s hiring.

This is probably not the Silicon Valley version of the dream he spent his childhood pursuing from Trinidad: long hours, intense pressure, endless AI discussions everywhere, punctuated by the occasional trip to an oil rig.

Yet, for now, it doesn’t matter to him. “In the last month or two, I have done nothing at all [outside the office]Because there’s a lot of intensity here about building, hiring, selling.” But “I feel very strong,” he adds.