As co-working booms in Boston, a Boston-born co-working company is getting a new chief executive.

Workbar said this week that an industry veteran, Sarah Travers, will step into the top job at the fast-growing company, taking the reins from Bill Jacobson, a tech entrepreneur who cofounded Workbar and has expanded it to eight Greater Boston locations.

Jacobson will stay on during a transition and remain on the company’s board.

Travers, who spent 15 years at the shared-office giant Regus before joining Workbar late last year as general manager, will handle day-to-day operations and plot Workbar’s continued growth.

“Coworking and flexible space is the fastest-growing segment of the office market, and Workbar is well-positioned to take advantage of expansion opportunities,’’ Travers said in a statement.

The move comes about six months after Workbar received a major investment from Apamanshop Holdings of Japan and said it planned to double its footprint in and around Boston and expand to at least one other market in North America.

The change of leadership also comes as co-working evolves from do-it-yourself operators leasing flexible space to startups and freelancers, into a much larger and more corporate industry. Jacobson launched Workbar when his landlord went out of business overnight in 2009, during the recession, leaving him with a cavernous office near South Station that he filled with like-minded startups. Now, the firm competes with the industry heavyweight WeWork — valued at more than $20 billion — and a slew of other deep-pocketed operators that are pouring into Boston and gobbling up office space, often leasing it to large corporate clients.

Having someone with Travers’s background in commercial real estate and in the co-working industry will help the company keep growing, Jacobson said.

Tim Logan can be reached at tim.logan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @bytimlogan.