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Thomas Lee Young doesn\u2019t sound like your typical Silicon Valley founder.<\/p>\n
The 24-year-old CEO of Interface<\/a>, a San Francisco startup using AI to prevent industrial accidents, is a white guy with a Caribbean accent and a Chinese last name, a combination he finds amusing enough to mention when he\u2019s first introduced to business contacts. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, the site of substantial oil and gas exploration activity, Young grew up around oil rigs and energy infrastructure because his entire family worked as engineers, stretching back generations to his great-grandfather, who immigrated to the island nation from China.<\/p>\n That background has become his calling card in pitch meetings with oil and gas executives today, but it makes for more than a great conversation starter; it underscores a path that has been anything but straightforward and that Young might argue gives Interface an edge.<\/p>\n It was years in the making. From age 11, Young fixated on Caltech with the intensity of someone much older. He watched shows about Silicon Valley online, mesmerized by the idea that people could build \u201canything and everything\u201d in America. He did everything possible to secure admission, even writing his application essay about hijacking his family\u2019s Roomba to create 3D spatial maps of his house.<\/p>\n The ploy worked \u2013 Caltech accepted him in 2020 \u2013 but then COVID-19 hit, and so did its ripple effects. For one thing, Young\u2019s visa situation became nearly impossible (visa appointments were cancelled and processing came to a halt). At the same time, his college fund, carefully built over six or seven years to $350,000 to cover his education, \u201cbasically got hit entirely\u201d by the abrupt market downturn in March of that year.<\/p>\n Without a lot of time to decide his future, he chose a cheaper three-year engineering program at the University of Bristol in the UK, studying mechanical engineering, but never abandoning his Silicon Valley dreams. \u201cI was devastated,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I realized I could still get something done.\u201d<\/p>\n At Bristol, Young landed at Jaguar Land Rover, working in something called human factors engineering \u2013 essentially the UX and safety design of industrial systems. \u201cI had never heard of it before I even joined,\u201d he admits. The role involved figuring out how to make cars and manufacturing lines as safe as possible, ensuring they were \u201cdummy proof\u201d for smooth operations.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<\/span> It was there, inside heavy industry, that Young saw the problem that would become Interface. He says the tools many companies use to manage safety documentation are either nonexistent \u2013 pen and paper \u2013 or so siloed and poorly designed that workers hate them. Worse, the operating procedures themselves \u2014 the instruction manuals and checklists that blue-collar workers rely on to stay safe \u2014 are riddled with errors, outdated, and nearly impossible to maintain.<\/p>\n Young pitched Jaguar on letting him build a solution, but the company wasn\u2019t interested. So he started plotting 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 its 1% acceptance rate. He was accepted to essentially pitch himself.<\/p>\n He told Jaguar he was going to a wedding in Trinidad and would be away for a week. Instead, he went to EF\u2019s selection process, impressed the organizers, and the day he returned to the office, quit. \u201cThey realized, \u2018Oh, so you probably weren\u2019t at a wedding,\u2019\u201d he laughs.<\/p>\n 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\u2019d been accepted to both Georgia Tech and Penn but similarly couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had similar backgrounds,\u201d Young says. \u201cHe\u2019s super international. He speaks five languages, very technical, amazing guy, and we got along very well.\u201d In fact, they were the only team in their EF cohort not to break up, says Young.<\/p>\n More than that, today, they live together in San Francisco\u2019s SoMa neighborhood, though asked about spending so much time together, Young is adamant that that\u2019s not an issue given their respective workloads. \u201cOver the last week, I\u2019ve seen [Aaryan] at home for maybe a combined total of 30 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n As for what, exactly, they are building, Interface\u2019s 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 \u2013 in a worst-case scenario \u2013 get workers killed.<\/p>\n Some of the numbers are arresting. For one of Canada\u2019s largest energy companies, where Interface is now deployed across three sites (Young declines to name the brand), Interface\u2019s software found 10,800 errors and improvements across the company\u2019s standard operating 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.<\/p>\n One error Young found particularly troubling, he says, was a document that had been in circulation for 10 years with the wrong pressure range listed for a valve. \u201cThey\u2019re just lucky that nothing happened,\u201d says Medha Agarwal, a partner at Defy.vc, which led Interface\u2019s $3.5 million seed round earlier this year, with participation from Precursor, Rockyard Ventures, and angel investors, including Charlie Songhurst.<\/p>\n The contracts are considerable. After initially trying outcome-based pricing (the energy company \u201chated it,\u201d 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 has more fuel and oil services customers coming online in Houston, Guyana, and Brazil.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n