The Team behind Trimontium

Trimontium Background – Vlado’s Story
Every founder has an origin story. Vlado's involves a basketball court, a career-ending injury, and a Roman name that would sit dormant in his mind for fifteen years before becoming a company. Growing up in Bulgaria, with a genuine fascination for astrophysics, Vlado's path toward professional basketball was cut short by injury, redirecting him to finance and an MBA at Wharton. The court's loss was the markets' gain.

Trained on other people's mistakes
After cutting his teeth in private equity, Vlado moved to Fortress Investment Group in London, focusing on corporate opportunistic credit and private capital solutions. It was seven years at Citi, spanning Leveraged Finance in New York and Institutional Recovery Management in London, that forged his investment philosophy. Every failed covenant, every mispriced risk and every workout gone wrong became a lesson catalogued for later. 

It was during this period that "Trimontium” the Roman name for his hometown first lodged in his mind. He wouldn't build the company around it for years, but the seed of long-term intent was already planted. So was the philosophy that still defines the firm today:

Don't lose a dollar of principal. Only once that's secured, chase every dollar of upside.

Building the platform, building the team
Vlado went on to help build Ares Management’s Special Situations platform across Europe and after that, did the same for Blackstone’s Strategic Opportunities Fund. It was there his future core team began taking shape, Bally Sangar, Yaroslav Syzonov, and later Igor Fischer and Graham Morrison who together now lead Trimontium, a platform fifteen years in the making, built on a philosophy formed in the wreckage of the last crisis, and named for a city that never forgot its Roman past.