Thomas Lee Young isn’t your average Silicon Valley founder, it seems.
The 24-year-old CEO of Interface, a San Francisco-based startup leveraging AI to avert industrial mishaps, is a white man with a Caribbean lilt and a Chinese surname, a blend he finds amusing enough to point out upon introduction to business acquaintances. Born and brought up in Trinidad and Tobago, a hub of significant oil and gas exploration, Young was surrounded by oil rigs and energy infrastructure, as his whole family were engineers, going back generations to his great-grandfather, who made his way to the island nation from China.
That history has become his calling card in meetings with oil and gas leaders today, but it offers more than just a good opening; it highlights a journey that has been anything but conventional and that Young might argue gives Interface a leg up.
It was years in the making. From the age of 11, Young was fixated on Caltech with an intensity beyond his years. He watched shows about Silicon Valley online, captivated by the notion that individuals could create “anything and everything” in America. He did all he could to ensure acceptance, even penning his application essay about commandeering his family’s Roomba to map his house in 3D.
The ploy worked – Caltech accepted him in 2020 – but then COVID-19 arrived, along with its resulting issues. For one, Young’s visa became almost unattainable (appointments were cancelled, and processing ground to a halt). Simultaneously, his college fund, meticulously amassed over six or seven years to $350,000 to finance his education, “basically took a complete hit” from the swift market downturn that March.
Without much time to determine his next steps, he chose a more affordable three-year engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, focusing on mechanical engineering, but never letting go of his Silicon Valley ambitions. “I was crushed,” he says, “but I understood I could still accomplish something.”
At Bristol, Young joined Jaguar Land Rover, working in what’s known as human factors engineering – essentially the UX and safety design of industrial systems. “I’d never encountered it before I joined,” he admits. The role involved determining how to make cars and manufacturing lines as safe as possible, ensuring they were “foolproof” for seamless operations.
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It was there, within heavy industry, that Young identified the issue that would become Interface. He suggests that the tools many companies use to handle safety documentation are either nonexistent – pen and paper – or so isolated and poorly designed that workers despise them. Worse, the operating procedures themselves — the instruction manuals and checklists that manual workers depend on for safety — are riddled with errors, out-of-date, and almost impossible to maintain.
Young suggested that Jaguar let him create a solution, but the company wasn’t keen. So he started planning his exit. When he discovered Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator that scouts promising people before they have a co-founder or even a concept, he applied despite its 1% acceptance rate. He was accepted to, in effect, pitch himself.
He told Jaguar he was going to a wedding in Trinidad and would be absent for a week. Instead, he attended EF’s selection process, impressed the organizers, and quit the day he returned to the office. “They realized, ‘Oh, so you probably weren’t at a wedding,’” he laughs.
At EF, Young encountered Aaryan Mehta, his future co-founder and CTO. Mehta, of Indian heritage but born in Belgium, also had an American dream that didn’t come to pass. He’d gained acceptance to both Georgia Tech and Penn but likewise couldn’t secure a visa appointment during COVID. He ended up studying math and computer science at Imperial College London, where he created AI for fault detection before developing machine learning pipelines at Amazon.
“We shared similar backgrounds,” Young notes. “He’s extremely international. He speaks five languages, very technical, amazing guy, and we got on really well.” Indeed, they were the only team in their EF cohort not to split up, says Young.
Furthermore, they currently reside together in San Francisco’s SoMa area, though when questioned about spending so much time together, Young is firm that it’s not a problem given their respective workloads. “Over the last week, I’ve probably seen [Aaryan] at home for a total of 30 minutes.”
As for what they are creating, Interface’s pitch is clear: employ AI to enhance safety in heavy industry. The company uses large language models to autonomously audit operating procedures, cross-referencing them against regulations, technical drawings, and corporate policies to identify errors that could – in a worst-case scenario – lead to worker fatalities.
Some of the statistics are striking. For one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is currently implemented across three sites (Young won’t reveal the name), Interface’s software uncovered 10,800 errors and improvements across the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. As Young explains, doing the same work manually would have cost over $35 million and taken two to three years.
One error Young found particularly concerning, he says, was a document that had been circulating for 10 years with the wrong pressure range listed for a valve. “They’re fortunate 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, including Charlie Songhurst.
The contracts are substantial. After initially trying outcome-based pricing (the energy company “hated it,” Young says), Interface shifted to a hybrid per-seat model with overage costs. A single contract with the Canadian energy company is worth over $2.5 million annually, and Interface has more fuel and oil services clients coming online in Houston, Guyana, and Brazil.
The total addressable market isn’t entirely defined, but it’s not small. In the U.S. alone, there are roughly 27,000 oil and gas services companies, according to the market research firm IBISWorld, and that’s just the initial sector Interface is targeting.
The outsider’s edge
Interestingly, Young’s age and background – factors that might seem like disadvantages in more established industries – have become his hidden advantages. When he enters a room of executives twice or three times his age, he says, there’s initial doubt. “Who is this young guy, and how does he know what he’s talking about?”
But then, he says, he delivers his “wow moment” by displaying an understanding of their operations, their workers’ daily routines, and precisely how much time and money Interface can save them. “Once you win them over, they will definitely love you and support and advocate for you,” he says. (He states that after a recent, first site visit with operators, five workers asked when they could invest in Interface, which made him particularly proud, given that field workers usually “dislike software providers.”)
Indeed, while Young works from Interface’s office in San Francisco’s Financial District, his hard hat sits on a table near his desk, ready for the next site visit. (Agarwal suggests Young could benefit from more downtime, recalling a recent call where Young mentioned that he hadn’t seen the sun all day.)
The company currently has eight employees – five in the office, three remote – mostly engineering hires, plus an operations person who just started this week. Interface’s primary challenge is hiring quickly enough to meet demand, a problem that requires its small team to leverage networks across both Europe and the US.
As for Young’s take on the life in San Francisco he desired and is now experiencing, he’s amazed at how accurate the Silicon Valley stereotypes have proven to be. “You see people online discussing, ‘Oh, you go to a park, and the person next to you has raised $50 million developing some crazy AI agent.’ But it’s actually like that,” he says. “I reflect on what life was like in Trinidad. I mention these ideas to people back home, and they simply don’t believe me.”
He sometimes makes time to venture into nature with friends – he mentions they recently visited Tahoe – and Interface hosts events like a hackathon they held last weekend. But mostly, it’s work, and most of that work involves AI, just like everyone else’s in San Francisco currently.
Which makes the trips to oil rigs strangely appealing.
Indeed, that hard hat in the office isn’t merely a practical item; it’s also an enticement, Young suggests. For engineers tired of creating “some low-impact B2B sales or recruiting tool,” as Young puts it, the possibility of occasionally escaping the Bay Area bubble to collaborate with operators in the field has become a recruitment advantage. Less than 1% of San Francisco startups operate in heavy industry, he notes, and that rarity is part of the allure, for him and his recruits.
It’s likely not the exact version of the Silicon Valley dream he spent his childhood chasing from Trinidad: long hours, intense pressure, constant AI discussions everywhere, punctuated by the occasional trip to an oil rig.
Still, for now, he doesn’t seem to mind it. “Over the last month or two months, I haven’t done much at all [outside the office], because there’s just been so much intensity here, with building, hiring, selling.” But “I feel quite strong,” he adds.
