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

Thomas Lee Young doesn’t sound like the typical Silicon Valley founder.

The 24-year-old CEO of Interfacea San Francisco startup that uses AI to prevent workplace accidents, is a white man with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, a combination he finds funny enough to mention when first introduced to business contacts. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, the site of substantial oil and gas exploration activities, 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 country from China.

Today, that background has become his calling card during pitch meetings with oil and gas executives, but it’s more than just a good conversation starter; it underlines a path that has been anything but easy and that Young believes gives Interface an edge.

It had been years in the making. From the age of 11, Young fixated on Caltech with the intensity of someone much older. He watched shows online about Silicon Valley, fascinated by the idea that people could build “anything and everything” in America. He did everything possible to gain access, even writing his application essay about hijacking his family’s Roomba to create 3D spatial maps of his home.

The ploy worked — Caltech accepted it in 2020 — but then COVID-19 hit, and so did its ripple effects. For starters, 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 over six or seven years to $350,000 to cover his education, was “basically completely hit” by the abrupt 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 Britain, where he studied mechanical engineering, but never abandoned his Silicon Valley dreams. “I was devastated,” he says, “but I realized I could still get something done.”

In Bristol, Young ended up at Jaguar Land Rover, where he worked 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 production lines as safe as possible, ensuring they were ‘dummy-proof’ for smooth operation.

It was there, within heavy industry, that Young saw the problem that Interface would become. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety documentation are either nonexistent – ​​pen and paper – or so hidden and poorly designed that employees hate them. Worse, the operating procedures themselves – the instruction manuals and checklists that workers rely on to stay safe – are riddled with errors, outdated and nearly impossible to maintain.

Young advised Jaguar to let him build a solution, but the company was not interested. So he started planning his departure. When he heard about Entrepreneur First (EF), a European talent incubator that recruits promising people before they have a co-founder or even an idea, he applied, despite the 1% acceptance rate. He was accepted to essentially pitch himself.

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

At EF, Young met Aaryan Mehta, his future co-founder and CTO. Mehta, of Indian descent but born in Belgium, had his own thwarted American dream. He was accepted to both Georgia Tech and Penn, but was also unable to get a visa appointment during COVID. He eventually studied mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, where he developed AI for error detection before building machine learning pipelines at Amazon.

“We had similar backgrounds,” Young says. “He’s super international. He speaks five languages, a very technical, great guy, and we got along really well.” In fact, they were the only team in their EF cohort that didn’t break up, Young says.

In fact, they now live together in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, though Young is asked if he spends that much time together, and he’s adamant that it’s not a problem given their respective workloads. ‘I saw it last week [Aaryan] home for maybe a total of 30 minutes.”

As for what exactly they’re building, Interface’s argument is simple: use AI to make heavy industry safer. The company autonomously monitors operating procedures using large language models and compares them to regulations, technical drawings and company policies to detect errors that – in the worst case – could lead to the death of employees.

Some of the numbers are arresting. For one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is now deployed in three locations (Young declined to name the brand), Interface’s software found 10,800 errors and improvements to the company’s standard procedures in just two and a half months. As Young tells it, the same work done manually would have cost more than $35 million and taken two to three years.

One error Young found particularly troubling, he says, was a document that had been in circulation for a decade that listed the wrong pressure range for a valve. “They’re just lucky nothing happened,” said Medha Agarwal, a partner at Defy.vc, who 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 significant. After initially trying outcome-based pricing (the power company “hated it,” Young says), Interface adopted a per-seat hybrid model with inflated costs. A single contract with the Canadian energy company is worth more than $2.5 million annually, and Interface has more and 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. In the US alone there are such things as 27,000 oil and gas services companies, according to market research firm IBISWorld, and that’s just the first industry Interface wants to tackle.

The edge of the outsider

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 with managers two or three times his age, there is initial skepticism, he says. “Who the hell is this young man and how does he know what he’s talking about?”

But then, he says, he delivers his “wow moment” by providing insight into 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 advocate and fight for you,” he says. (He claims that after a recent initial site visit with operators, five employees asked when they could invest in Interface, which made him particularly proud since the field workers typically “hate software vendors.”)

Although Young works out of Interface’s office in San Francisco’s financial district, his helmet sits on a table not far from his desk, ready for the next site visit. (Agarwal suggests that Young could use a little more free time in his life, recalling a recent phone call in which Young told her he hadn’t seen the sun all day.)

The company now has eight employees – five in the office, three remote – mainly technical staff, plus an operations staff member who started this week. Interface’s biggest challenge is hiring quickly enough to meet demand, a problem that will require its small team to tap into networks in both Europe and the US.

As for what Young thinks about the San Francisco life he wanted and is now living, he marvels at how accurate Silicon Valley stereotypes turned out 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 to build an insane AI agent.’ But actually that’s how it is,” he says. “I think back to what life was like in Trinidad. I tell these ideas to people back home, and they just don’t believe me.”

He occasionally makes time to get out into nature with friends – he says they recently went to Tahoe – and Interface organizes events like a hackathon they hosted last weekend. But mostly it’s work, and most of that work involves AI, just like everyone else is doing in San Francisco right now.

That makes trips to oil rigs strangely attractive.

Indeed, that helmet in the office is not just a practical necessity; it’s also a lure, Young suggests. For engineers tired of building “a 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. Less than 1% of San Francisco startups work in heavy industry, he notes, and that scarcity is part of the appeal, both for him and for the people he hires.

It’s probably not quite the version of the Silicon Valley dream he spent growing up from Trinidad: long hours, intense pressure, endless AI discussions everywhere, punctuated by the occasional trip to an oil rig.

Still, he doesn’t seem to mind for now. “I haven’t done much at all in the past month or two months [outside the office]because there has been so much intensity here, with building, hiring and selling. But “I feel pretty strong,” he adds.