Charlton Trezevant’s career has come full circle.
Trezevant, a Tampa native and Plant High School graduate, has loved engineering and coding since childhood. In his free time, he built gadgets like an automated toilet flusher and a radio receiver system to eavesdrop on local airwaves.
He first dreamed of starting a technology company in elementary school, he said. It’s partly why he founded the software developer meetup group and nonprofit called Tampa Devs, which has grown into one of the largest tech groups in the area with more than a thousand members.
When Trezevant stepped down from his position with Atlanta-based software services firm Xebia in early 2024, he went all-in on his dream by teaming up with a former Xebia executive, Sarasota-based Robert Bremer. Now, Bremer and Trezevant are leveraging their combined expertise of more than a decade in the information technology space to co-found Packfiles, a project management and software platform.
“After being in a professional services consulting world for a period of time, the product space is really appealing to us,” Bremer said. “Our shared passion today is taking all this knowledge gained and converting that into products.”
After meeting and working together in the Tampa Bay area, the two realized a shared vision: a tool that eliminates the need for service firms during the coding file migration process, which developers utilize for efficiency. The tool seeks to simply and controllably migrate files to Microsoft-owned platform GitHub, a popular tool for software developers that hosts code for collaboration and storage.
Bremer has more than a decade of leadership experience with IT consulting. Bremer will operate as the CEO for Packfiles, while Trezevant will be the CTO.
“We have a lot of complementary skill sets and so on, but we have built things together from the ground up,” Trezevant said.
The startup has hired a developer from the Tampa Bay region and has set out to start building the Packfiles platform. The Tampa Bay region also represents a personal goal for the founders: They want to stimulate the startup ecosystem.
“There’s the satisfaction of building an incredible product and bringing that to market and serving our customers,” Trezevant said. “But the other thing I want is for [Packfiles] to be an unassailable success story for the Tampa Bay area.”
Choosing Tampa
Trezevant first noticed Tampa Bay’s changing tide for startups and technology when he returned to his hometown during the Covid-19 pandemic. He started interacting with nonprofit startup hub Embarc Collective and the nonprofit accelerator program Tampa Bay Wave. Trezevant’s work with the developer community showed him the potential here, he said.
“It completely changed my perspective,” Trezevant said. “I went from thinking that I can only seriously be successful if I go to the West Coast to thinking there is all of the infrastructure here in Florida and especially in Tampa, that’s necessary to build a successful technology business.”
Bremer concurs. He lived in Austin, Texas during the Covid-19 pandemic to explore entrepreneurship, he said. It ultimately made him re-evaluate the Tampa Bay area.
“I was surprised to run into people who had connections to St. Petersburg,” Bremer said. “It reaffirmed for me that this is an up-and-coming world.”
