Trive Capital

Managing Partner Conner Searcy carries ultimate responsibility for all firm activities, including investment decisions. He is supported by a partnership group of seven other Partners — including co-founder Chris Zugaro and Head of Business Development Brad Wiginton — and seven Managing Directors who lead deal execution and portfolio oversight. The investment committee is drawn from this senior group, which has worked together since the firm's 2012 launch.

Trive runs a hybrid capital model that underwrites control equity, structured preferred equity, and junior debt from the same fund complex. This allows the firm to close transactions without third-party financing contingencies — critical in bankruptcy auctions, carve-outs, and family-ownership transitions where sellers prioritize speed and certainty. The operations team then embeds with management to run value-creation initiatives, a posture the firm attributes to its partners' earlier careers at Bain & Company and operational turnaround groups.

Trive focuses exclusively on middle-market companies across North America and invests in buyouts, growth recapitalizations, corporate carve-outs, take-privates, restructurings, and secondaries. The firm does not disclose stage boundaries — such as revenue or EBITDA thresholds — but its completed transactions span family-owned businesses, public-to-private deals, and bankruptcy-driven restarts, implying a mandate flexible enough to absorb businesses from $10 million to several hundred million in enterprise value.

Searcy spent roughly a decade at Insight Equity, a middle-market buyout firm he joined at inception, where he executed control investments and operational turnarounds. Before that, he worked at Bain & Company on turnaround management and merger integration, and at Stonegate, a building-products-focused buyout shop. That trajectory — operational consulting into concentrated middle-market private equity — formed the DNA of Trive's hands-on, operationally intensive investment model.