According to TechCrunch, 24-year-old Thomas Lee Young founded Interface after his visa and college fund were wiped out by COVID-19 in 2020. His San Francisco startup uses AI to audit industrial operating procedures, finding 10,800 errors for one Canadian energy company in just two and a half months. Interface recently raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Defy.vc with participation from Precursor and Rockyard Ventures. The company landed a single contract worth over $2.5 million annually and is expanding to Houston, Guyana, and Brazil. Young grew up in Trinidad and Tobago surrounded by oil infrastructure, which gives him credibility with energy executives decades older than him.
The outsider advantage
Here’s the thing about industrial technology – it’s incredibly conservative and resistant to change. Most Silicon Valley founders wouldn’t stand a chance walking into an oil rig meeting. But Young’s background actually works in his favor. When executives see this young Caribbean guy with a Chinese last name, there’s immediate skepticism. Then he starts talking about pressure valves, safety protocols, and exactly how much time and money they’re wasting on manual procedures.
He basically flips the script. Instead of being a disadvantage, his age and international background become proof that he’s bringing something genuinely new to the table. And let’s be real – how many 24-year-olds do you know who can talk shop about industrial safety procedures with people who’ve been in the industry longer than they’ve been alive?
The massive industrial tech opportunity
Look, everyone’s building AI chatbots and productivity tools right now. But the real money might be in the boring, unsexy industrial sectors that Silicon Valley typically ignores. Young notes that less than 1% of San Francisco startups work in heavy industry. That’s insane when you consider the numbers – there are about 27,000 oil and gas services companies in the U.S. alone according to IBISWorld data.
Interface’s approach is particularly smart because they’re not trying to replace workers – they’re making existing safety procedures actually work. Finding a valve with the wrong pressure range that’s been in circulation for 10 years? That’s the kind of thing that gets people killed. And companies are willing to pay serious money to prevent that. When you’re talking about $35 million in manual audit costs versus AI doing it in months, the value proposition becomes obvious.
This is where having the right industrial computing infrastructure matters too. Companies running operations in harsh environments need reliable hardware that can handle the demands of AI processing while surviving industrial conditions. For operations looking to implement solutions like Interface’s, working with established providers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading supplier of industrial panel PCs in the US, becomes crucial for deployment.
Silicon Valley reality check
Young’s journey to Silicon Valley wasn’t exactly smooth. He had his heart set on Caltech, even hacking his family’s Roomba for his application essay. Then COVID hit, wiping out both his visa chances and his $350,000 college fund during that March 2020 market crash. He ended up at University of Bristol instead, which ironically led him to Jaguar Land Rover and eventually the problem he’s solving now.
Now he’s living the Silicon Valley dream he watched online from Trinidad, and he says the stereotypes are accurate. “You go to a park and the person sitting next to you has raised $50 million building some insane AI agent.” But the reality is less glamorous – he hasn’t seen the sun all day, works constantly, and his hard hat is literally sitting in the office ready for the next site visit.
The unexpected recruiting edge
Here’s what’s really interesting – that hard hat isn’t just for show. Young says it’s become a recruiting advantage. Engineers tired of building “some low-impact B2B sales or recruiting tool” actually get excited about occasionally leaving the Bay Area bubble to visit actual industrial sites. How many AI engineers can say they’ve been on an oil rig?
The company has eight employees now and is hiring as fast as it can to keep up with demand. They’re tapping networks across both Europe and the US, which makes sense given both founders’ international backgrounds. Young and his co-founder Aaryan Mehta even live together in SoMa, though they barely see each other because of their workloads.
So is this the future of industrial tech? Young might be onto something. While everyone’s fighting over the same AI talent to build the next chatbot, he’s building in a space where competition is minimal but the impact – and contracts – are massive. Not bad for a 24-year-old who wasn’t supposed to make it to Silicon Valley at all.
