Thomas Lee Young is not your typical Silicon Valley founder. The 24-year-old CEO of Interface, a San Francisco startup using AI to prevent industrial accidents, has a unique background. He is a white man with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, a combination he finds amusing enough to mention in new business meetings. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, a location with substantial oil and gas activity, Young grew up around energy infrastructure as his entire family, for generations since his great-grandfather immigrated from China, worked as engineers.
This personal history is now his calling card in meetings with oil and gas executives. It is more than a conversation starter; it highlights a path that has been anything but straightforward, a journey Young might argue gives his company an edge.
His ambition was forged early. From age eleven, Young was intensely focused on attending Caltech. He watched shows about Silicon Valley online, mesmerized by the idea that people in America could build anything. He did everything to secure admission, even writing his application essay about hijacking his family’s Roomba to create 3D maps of his house.
The ploy worked, and Caltech accepted him in 2020. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, creating ripple effects. His visa situation became nearly impossible as appointments were canceled and processing halted. Simultaneously, his college fund, carefully built over six or seven years to $350,000, was essentially wiped out by the abrupt market downturn that March.
With little time to decide his future, he chose a cheaper three-year engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, studying mechanical engineering. He never abandoned his Silicon Valley dreams, stating he was devastated but realized he could still get something done.
At Bristol, Young landed a role at Jaguar Land Rover in human factors engineering, a field he had never heard of before. The role involved the UX and safety design of industrial systems, figuring out how to make cars and manufacturing lines as safe and dummy-proof as possible.
It was inside heavy industry that Young identified the problem that would become Interface. He observed that the tools companies use to manage safety documentation are often nonexistent, relying on pen and paper, or are so poorly designed that workers dislike them. The operating procedures themselves, the manuals and checklists workers rely on for safety, are frequently riddled with errors, outdated, and nearly impossible to maintain.
Young pitched Jaguar on letting him build a solution, but the company was not interested. So he began plotting his exit. He learned about Entrepreneur First, a European talent incubator with a one percent acceptance rate that recruits individuals before they have a co-founder or even an idea, and he cold-applied. He was accepted to essentially pitch himself.
He told Jaguar he was attending a wedding in Trinidad for a week. Instead, he went to the selection process, impressed the organizers, and quit his job the day he returned to the office. He recalls they realized he probably was not at a wedding.
At Entrepreneur First, 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 had been accepted to Georgia Tech and Penn but also could not get a visa appointment during COVID. He ended up studying math and computer science at Imperial College London, where he developed AI for fault detection before building machine learning pipelines at Amazon.
Young says they had similar backgrounds, describing Mehta as super international, speaking five languages, very technical, and an amazing guy. They got along very well. In fact, Young says they were the only team in their cohort not to break up. Today, they live together in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. When asked about spending so much time together, Young is adamant it is not an issue given their workloads, noting that over the last week he has seen Mehta at home for maybe a combined total of thirty minutes.
Interface’s pitch is straightforward: use AI to make heavy industry safer. The company autonomously audits operating procedures using large language models, cross-checking them against regulations, technical drawings, and corporate policies to catch errors that could, in a worst-case scenario, get workers killed.
The results are significant. For one of Canada’s largest energy companies, where Interface is now deployed across three sites, the software found 10,800 errors and improvements across the company’s standard operating procedures in just two and a half months. Young states the same work done manually would have cost more than $35 million and taken two to three years.
One error Young found particularly troubling was a document that had been in circulation for ten years with the wrong pressure range listed for a valve. A partner at Defy.vc, which led Interface’s $3.5 million seed round earlier this year, noted they were just lucky that nothing happened.
The contracts are considerable. After initially trying outcome-based pricing, which the energy company hated, 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. Interface has more fuel and oil services customers coming online in Houston, Guyana, and Brazil.
The total addressable market is not small. In the United States alone, there are approximately 27,000 oil and gas services companies, and that is just the first vertical Interface wants to tackle.
Interestingly, Young’s age and background, things that might seem like disadvantages in established industries, have become his secret weapons. He says when he walks into a room of executives twice or three times his age, there is initial skepticism about who this young guy is and how he knows what he is talking about.
But then he delivers what he calls his wow moment, explaining his understanding of their operations, their workers’ daily routines, and exactly how much time and money Interface can save them. He says once you can flip them, they will absolutely love you and advocate for you. He claims that after a recent first site visit with operators, five workers asked when they could invest in Interface, which made him particularly proud given field workers typically hate software providers.
Though Young works from Interface’s office in San Francisco’s Financial District, his hard hat sits on a table nearby, ready for the next site visit. A investor suggested Young could use more down time, recalling a recent call where Young said he had not seen the sun all day.
The company now has eight employees, five in the office and three remote, mostly engineering hires plus a new operations person. Interface’s biggest challenge is hiring fast enough to keep up with demand, a problem that requires its small team to tap networks across both Europe and the United States.
As for his life in San Francisco, Young marvels at how accurate the Silicon Valley stereotypes turned out to be. He says you see people online talking about going to a park and the person sitting next to you has raised fifty million dollars building some insane AI agent, and it is actually like that. He thinks back to life in Trinidad and how people back home do not believe him when he mentions these ideas.
He occasionally makes time to go out in nature with friends, like a recent trip to Tahoe, and Interface hosts events like a recent hackathon. But mostly it is work, and most of that work involves AI, just like everyone else in San Francisco right now.
This makes the trips to oil rigs oddly appealing. The hard hat in the office is not just a practical necessity; it is also a lure. For engineers tired of building low-impact business tools, the promise of occasionally leaving the Bay Area to work with operators in the field has become a recruiting advantage. Young notes that less than one percent of San Francisco startups work in heavy industry, and that scarcity is part of the appeal for him and the people he is hiring.
It is probably not quite the version of the Silicon Valley dream he spent his childhood chasing from Trinidad. It involves long hours, intense pressure, endless AI discussions, and occasional trips to an oil rig.
For now, he does not seem to mind it. He says over the last month or two he has not done much outside the office because there has been so much intensity with building, hiring, and selling. But he adds that he feels pretty strong.