Thomas Lee Young, the 24-year-old CEO of San Francisco-based startup Interface, is not your typical Silicon Valley founder. His company leverages artificial intelligence to prevent industrial accidents, and his unique background—a white man with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago—has become his secret weapon in an industry often resistant to change.
Young grew up immersed in the oil and gas sector, surrounded by rigs and energy infrastructure, as his family, stretching back generations to his great-grandfather who immigrated from China, worked as engineers. This deep-rooted understanding of heavy industry, combined with an unwavering ambition for Silicon Valley, has shaped a path that is anything but straightforward, giving Interface a distinct edge.
From Caribbean Rigs to Caltech Dreams
From the age of 11, Young was fixated on Caltech, captivated by the Silicon Valley ideal of building "anything and everything" in America. He pursued admission relentlessly, even writing his application essay about hacking his family's Roomba to create 3D spatial maps of his home. His efforts paid off, and he was accepted to Caltech in 2020.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought unforeseen challenges. Young's visa situation became nearly impossible due to cancellations and processing halts. Simultaneously, his college fund, meticulously built over six or seven years to $350,000, was "basically hit entirely" by the abrupt market downturn in March of that year. With little time to spare, he opted for a more affordable three-year mechanical engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, though his Silicon Valley dreams remained intact. "I was devastated," he recalls, "but I realized I could still get something done."
Discovering a Critical Problem in Heavy Industry
At Bristol, Young secured a role at Jaguar Land Rover, working in human factors engineering—essentially the UX and safety design of industrial systems. "I had never heard of it before I even joined," he admits. This role involved optimizing cars and manufacturing lines for maximum safety, ensuring they were "dummy proof" for smooth operations.
It was within this heavy industrial environment that Young identified the core problem Interface would address. He observed that many companies relied on non-existent or archaic safety documentation methods, often just pen and paper. Existing digital tools were siloed and poorly designed, leading to worker frustration. More critically, the operating procedures—the instruction manuals and checklists essential for blue-collar workers' safety—were frequently riddled with errors, outdated, and nearly impossible to maintain.
Young pitched Jaguar on developing a solution, but the company wasn't interested. This prompted him to plan his exit. He cold-applied to Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator known for its 1% acceptance rate, which recruits promising individuals even before they have a co-founder or a concrete idea. He was accepted to pitch himself.
He informed Jaguar he was attending a wedding in Trinidad for a week. Instead, he participated in EF's rigorous selection process, impressing the organizers. The day he returned to the office, he quit. "They realized, 'Oh, so you probably weren't at a wedding,'" he laughs.
Building Interface: AI for Industrial Safety
At EF, Young met Aaryan Mehta, who would become his co-founder and CTO. Mehta, of Indian descent but born in Belgium, also faced a thwarted American dream, unable to secure a visa during COVID-19 despite acceptances to Georgia Tech and Penn. He studied math and computer science at Imperial College London, developing AI for fault detection before building machine learning pipelines at Amazon.
"We had similar backgrounds," Young notes. "He's super international. He speaks five languages, very technical, amazing guy, and we got along very well." They were the only team in their EF cohort not to break up, and today, they even live together in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood, though Young jokes that their respective workloads mean they rarely see each other at home.
Interface's mission is straightforward: use AI to make heavy industry safer. The company's software autonomously audits operating procedures using large language models (LLMs), cross-checking them against regulations, technical drawings, and corporate policies. This process catches errors that, in a worst-case scenario, could lead to fatalities.
The results have been striking. For one of Canada's largest energy companies, where Interface is deployed across three sites, the software identified 10,800 errors and potential improvements in standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. Young estimates that the same work done manually would have cost over $35 million and taken two to three years. One particularly troubling error Young found was a document in circulation for a decade with an incorrect pressure range listed for a valve. "They're just lucky that nothing happened," says Medha Agarwal, a 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 like Charlie Songhurst.
Interface's contracts are substantial. After initially experimenting with outcome-based pricing (which the energy company "hated," Young says), Interface adopted a hybrid per-seat model with overage costs. A single contract with the Canadian energy company is worth more than $2.5 million annually, and Interface is expanding with new fuel and oil services customers coming online in Houston, Guyana, and Brazil.
The total addressable market is significant. In the U.S. alone, there are approximately 27,000 oil and gas services companies, according to market research firm IBISWorld, and this is just Interface's initial vertical.
The Outsider's Edge
Young's age and background, which might typically be seen as disadvantages in established industries, have become his secret weapons. When he enters a room of executives two or three times his age, he admits there's initial skepticism: "Who the hell is this young guy and how does he know what he's talking about?"
However, Young quickly delivers his "wow moment" by demonstrating a deep understanding of their operations, their workers' daily routines, and the precise time and money Interface can save them. "Once you can flip them, they will absolutely love you and advocate and fight for you," he explains. He proudly recounts a recent site visit where five field workers, who typically "hate software providers," asked how they could invest in Interface.
Though Young works from Interface's San Francisco Financial District office, his hard hat sits nearby, ready for the next site visit. (Agarwal notes that Young could use more downtime, recalling a call where he mentioned not having seen the sun all day.)
The company currently has eight employees—five in the office, three remote—mostly engineering hires, plus a new operations person. Interface's biggest challenge is hiring fast enough to meet demand, requiring its small team to tap networks across both Europe and the U.S.
Young marvels at how accurate Silicon Valley stereotypes have proven to be. "You see people online talking about, 'Oh, you go to a park and the person sitting next to you has raised $50 million building some insane AI agent.' But it is actually like that," he says. "I think back to what life was like in Trinidad. I mention these ideas to people back home, and they just don't believe me."
While he occasionally finds time for nature trips with friends, and Interface hosts events like hackathons, his life is predominantly consumed by work, much of it involving AI, like many others in San Francisco. This makes the trips to oil rigs an oddly appealing change of pace.
That hard hat in the office isn't just a practical necessity; it's also a recruiting tool. 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 significant advantage. Less than 1% of San Francisco startups work in heavy industry, he notes, and that scarcity is part of the appeal for both him and the talent he's hiring.
It may not be the exact version of the Silicon Valley dream he chased from Trinidad—long hours, intense pressure, endless AI discussions, punctuated by occasional trips to oil rigs—but for now, Young doesn't seem to mind. "Over the last month or two months, I have not done much at all [outside the office], because there's just been so much intensity here, with building, hiring, selling." Despite the demanding schedule, he adds, "I feel pretty strong."
