Trimaran Capital Partners is a middle-market private equity firm formerly affiliated with CIBC World Markets. Trimaran is headquartered in New York City and founded by former investment bankers from Drexel Burnham Lambert. Trimaran's predecessors were early investors in telecom and Internet businesses, most notably backing Global Crossing in 1997. Trimaran also led the first leveraged buyout of an integrated electric utility.

Since 1995, Trimaran and its successor entities have invested approximately $1.6 billion of equity in fifty-nine companies through transactions totaling more than $10 billion in total value. In addition, Trimaran's debt business has managed approximately $1.5 billion of leveraged loans across four collateralized loan obligation vehicles.

Since 2006, one of its co-founders, Andrew Heyer, lead a spinout of a portion of its team to form Mistral Equity Partners In 2008, the two remaining managing partners entered into a venture with Nelson Peltz’s Trian to create a new debt-focused business development company.

The firm is named for the trimaran, a multi-hulled boat consisting of a main hull and two smaller outrigger hulls. The firm's principals had used nautical terms to describe their predecessor entities including argosy, a merchant ship, or a fleet of such ships and caravelle, a small, highly maneuverable, two- or three-masted ship.

Trimaran Capital Partners was founded in 2000 by former Drexel Burnham Lambert and CIBC World Markets investment bankers Jay Bloom, Andrew Heyer, and Dean Kehler. The firm traces its roots back to the 1995 creation of the CIBC Argosy Merchant funds, a series of merchant banking investment funds managed on behalf of CIBC, and before that to the 1990 founding of the boutique investment banking firm The Argosy Group.

The Argosy Group was a New York-based boutique investment bank founded in February 1990, and is Trimaran's earliest predecessor. Founded as a 9-person advisory firm by Bloom, Heyer, and Kehler, Argosy was one of several private equities and investment banking firms to spring up in the wake of the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert. Before Drexel, the three bankers had all worked together at Shearson Lehman Brothers. Kehler and Bloom had worked together previously at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb and were joined by Heyer when Lehman was acquired by Shearson/American Express. The Argosy team had been involved in many of the most prominent high yield financings of the preceding two decades, for companies including RJR Nabisco, Beatrice Foods, and Storer Communications.

The Argosy Group focused on debt underwriting, private placements, sales and trading, proprietary special situation investing, and restructuring advisory assignments for highly leveraged companies. Argosy created a niche raising high yield debt.

In April 1995, CIBC's investment banking subsidiary, then known as CIBC Wood Gundy announced the acquisition of The Argosy Group,