Thomas Lee Young doesn’t look like your typical Silicon Valley founder.
Its 24-year-old CEO Interfacea San Francisco startup that uses artificial intelligence to prevent industrial accidents, is a white guy with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese surname, a combination he finds quite amusing to mention when first introduced to business contacts. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, the site of significant oil and gas exploration activity, Young grew up around oil rigs and energy infrastructure because his entire family worked as engineers, generations of immigrants from his great-grandfather, who immigrated to the island nation from China.
That background has become his calling card in meetings with oil and gas executives today, but it’s more than just a great conversation starter. highlights a path that was anything but straightforward and that Young could support gives Interface an edge.
It was years in the making. From the age of 11, Young applied himself to Caltech with the intensity of someone much older. He watched shows about Silicon Valley online, fascinated by the idea that people could build “anything and everything” in America. He did everything possible to secure entry, even writing his essay about hacking his family’s Roomba to create 3D spatial maps of his home.
The ploy worked—Caltech accepted him in 2020—but then COVID-19 hit, and so did its ripple effects. First, Young’s visa status became almost impossible (visa appointments were canceled and processing stopped). At the same time, his college fund, carefully built up over six or seven years to $350,000 to cover his education, was “basically blown out of whack” by the sharp market downturn in March of that year.
Without much time to decide his future, he opted for a cheaper three-year engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, studying mechanical engineering, but never gave up on his Silicon Valley dreams. “I was devastated,” he says, “but I realized I could still do something.”
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 even joined,” he admits. The role included how to make the cars and manufacturing lines as safe as possible, ensuring they are ‘falsified’ to run smoothly.
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There, in heavy industry, Young saw the problem that would become Interface. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety documentation are either non-existent – pen and paper – or so clunky and poorly designed that employees hate them. Worse, the operating procedures themselves—the instruction manuals and checklists that employees rely on to stay safe—are error-ridden, outdated, and nearly impossible to maintain.
Young suggested Jaguar let him build a solution, but the company wasn’t interested. So he started planning his exit. When he learned about Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator that recruits promising individuals before they have a co-founder or even an idea, he cold-applied despite a 1% acceptance rate. He was essentially accepted to compete.
He told Jaguar he was going to a wedding in Trinidad and would be gone for a week. Instead, he went to EF’s selection process, impressed the organizers, and the day he returned to the office, he resigned. “They realized, ‘Oh, so you probably weren’t at a wedding,'” she laughs.
At EF, Young met Aaryan Mehta, its future co-founder and CTO. Mehta, of Indian descent but born in Belgium, had his own thwarted American dream. He had been accepted to both Georgia Tech and Penn, but was similarly unable to get a visa appointment during COVID. He ended up studying maths and computer science at Imperial College London, where he developed artificial intelligence for debugging before building machine learning pipelines at Amazon.
“We had similar backgrounds,” says Young. “He’s super international. He speaks five languages, very technical, an amazing guy and we got along really well.” In fact, it was the only group in the EF group that didn’t split, Young says.
More than that, today they live together in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, although when asked how they spend so much time together, Young is adamant that it’s not a problem given their workloads. “In the last week, I saw [Aaryan] at home for maybe a total of 30 minutes.”
As for what exactly they’re building, Interface’s pitch is clear: use artificial intelligence to make heavy industry safer. The company autonomously checks operational processes using large language models, cross-checking them with regulations, technical plans and corporate policies to identify mistakes that could – in the worst case – kill workers.
Some of the numbers are arresting. For one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is now deployed in three locations (Young declines to name the brand), Interface’s software identified 10,800 errors and improved the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. Young says the same job done by hand would cost more than $35 million and take two to three years.
One error Young found particularly troubling, he says, was a paper that had been circulating for 10 years with the wrong pressure range listed for a valve. “They’re just lucky nothing happened,” says Medha Agarwal, partner at Defy.vc, which led Interface’s $3.5 million seed round earlier this year, with participation from Precursor, Rockyard Ventures and angel investors including Charlie Songhurst.
Contracts are important. After initially trying outcome-based pricing (the energy company “hated it,” Young says), Interface adopted a cost-prohibitive per-seat hybrid model. A single contract with the Canadian energy company is worth more than $2.5 million annually, and Interface has more fuel and oil services customers coming online in Houston, Guyana and Brazil.
The total addressable market is not entirely clear, but it is not small. Only in the US, there are such things as 27,000 oil and gas service companies, according to market research group IBISWorld, and that’s just the first industry Interface wants to tackle.
The edge of the underdog
Interestingly, Young’s age and background – things that might seem like disadvantages when it comes to more established industries – have become his secret weapons. When he walks into a room of executives two or three times his age, he says, there is initial skepticism. “Who the hell is this young man and how does he know what he’s talking about?”
But then, he says, he delivers the “wow moment,” explaining his understanding of their operations, their employees’ daily routines, and exactly how much time and money Interface can save them. “Once you can turn them around, they will absolutely love you and support you and fight for you,” she says. (He claims that after a recent first-time site visit with operators, five employees asked when they might invest in Interconnection, which made him particularly proud, given that workers in the field typically “hate software vendors.”)
Indeed, although Young works out of Interface’s office in San Francisco’s Financial District, his hard hat sits on a table not far from his office, ready for the next site visit. (Agarwal suggests Young use a little more time in his life, recalling a recent call where Young told her he hadn’t seen the sun all day.)
The company now has eight employees – five in the office, three remotely – mostly engineering hires, plus one person who just started this week. Interface’s biggest challenge is hiring fast enough to keep up with demand, a problem that requires its small team to tap into networks in both Europe and the US.
As for what Young makes of the San Francisco life he wanted and lives now, he marvels at how accurate Silicon Valley stereotypes have proven to be. “You see people on the Internet talking about, ‘Oh, you go to a park and the person sitting next to you has raised $50 million by creating an insane AI agent.’ But that’s actually how it is,” he says. “I think back to what life was like in Trinidad. I bring these ideas up to people back home and they just don’t believe me.”
He occasionally finds time to get out in nature with friends — he says they went to Tahoe recently — and Interface hosts events like a hackathon they threw last weekend. But mostly, it’s work, and most of that work involves AI, just like everyone else in San Francisco right now.
Which makes traveling to oil rigs strangely appealing.
Indeed, this hard hat in the office is not just a practical necessity. it’s also a lure, Young suggests. For engineers tired of building “some low-impact B2B sales or recruiting tools,” 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. Less than 1 percent of San Francisco startups work in heavy industry, he notes, and that lack is part of the appeal, for him and the people he hires.
He’s probably not exactly the version of the Silicon Valley dream he spent his childhood chasing from Trinidad: long hours, intense pressure, endless discussions of artificial intelligence everywhere, punctuated by the occasional trip to an oil rig.
However, for now, he doesn’t seem to mind. “The last month or two, I haven’t done much [outside the office]because there was just so much tension here, with the manufacturing, the hiring, the sales.” But “I feel pretty strong,” he adds.
