Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Zachary Perdomo, Co-Founder & COO of Alchemain, an innovative cloud-based platform designed to empower developers by automating the process of dependency management.

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

Alchemain provides AI-powered dev tools, specifically 00felix, to automate dependency management and help developers maintain secure and stable codebases with minimal manual effort.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to launch your company?

The founders of Alchemain spent years at security startups that promised “total visibility” and the elusive “single pane of glass.” We quickly realized the flaw in that logic: visibility without resolution is just noise. These tools were great at finding problems, but they left the actual heavy lifting entirely to the developers. We built Alchemain to bridge that gap. We don’t just add to the backlog; we provide the tools to actually clear it.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

No matter the number of vulnerabilities that can be identified or prioritized, it will always be up to the developers to fix these issues. Developers are not hired to fix vulnerabilities or reduce technical debt; this is not normally built into sprints, and it is usually the last thing they want to spend their time doing. We want to free developers from spending up to 30% of their time on these types of issues, imagine being able to add that valuable time back to new features or projects that could take a company/product to the next level….imagine not having to delay roadmap items due to technical debt or dependency issues that need to be resolved prior to moving forward with a sprint…

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

One of our founders passed away a little more than a year into our journey – he had a massive impact on our other founders’ career trajectories. He taught us so much about product, business, and GTM strategy…..we continued to push the company forward, because he wouldn’t want it any other way. He is in the back of our minds whenever we make decisions around the company (large or small). We’ll never fully overcome the loss, but he would want us to continue to strive for success.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We plan to close our first customers in the coming month which we will leverage to get us VC money for our Seed round – this will help drive our company forward from a GTM perspective and substantially move up our roadmap items.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Create what you are passionate about quickly and get it in front of your target customers or into their hands – listen to them and iterate constantly. What you originally wanted to build will never be what you end up with…..the faster you can iterate (with real feedback) from starting product to GA will greatly benefit the company.

Why Florida?

Florida has a lot of untapped potential that needs to be uncovered or nurtured – also, one of our founders is a Tampa local, and it doesn’t hurt that Florida is an employer friendly state.