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.

The firm describes investing in both equity and debt securities to create 'bespoke, tailored capital solutions' but has not publicly disclosed whether it maintains distinct fund vehicles for its control-equity and structured-capital strategies. Brad Wiginton leads the structured capital effort, which originates junior-capital and preferred-equity investments, indicating at least a dedicated team and strategy sleeve within the broader platform.

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.

Trive has not published a list of excluded sectors. Publicly confirmed investments touch advanced manufacturing, industrials, business services, and healthcare, while team backgrounds include energy and consumer retail. The firm's generalist label and stated willingness to move across 'industries and sectors' suggest no rigid exclusionary policy, though live-fire concentration appears heaviest in industrial and business-services verticals.

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.

Trive promotes its ability to serve as the sole financial sponsor in a transaction and frequently references closing deals with proprietary capital. The firm has not publicly detailed a co-investment program for external LPs, nor does it advertise participation in GP-led club deals, suggesting it prefers full control of the capital structure in its core investments.