As investors, we partner with ambitious founders at the earliest stages of company-building. Through the many ups and downs and the long journey ahead, we aim to be your most trusted partner, from seed to scale.

Trilogy Equity Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology companies in the Seattle area and greater Pacific Northwest. This region has shaped the modern technology landscape — from wireless and aerospace to developer tools and cloud platforms — and the people who built these breakthroughs at the bleeding edge live and work right here. Our mission is to partner with ambitious founders who are reshaping markets, challenging conventions, and defining the next chapter of the PNW innovation story.

We specialize in investing in early-stage startups. Most of the time, this is at the Seed stage although at times we will also invest at Pre-Seed or Series A. We back both pre-revenue and post-revenue companies, with the goal of partnering with founders at the moment when product, team, and early customer signals begin to align.

Our sweet spot is leading fundraising rounds. Depending on when we start working with a company, this typically means our initial investment will range from $2 to $6 million. We also aim to be supportive as your company grows and reserve capital so we can continue to invest in multiple subsequent rounds.

We’re a hands-on partner that rolls up our sleeves and has your back when it counts. Our team consists of former operators who work closely with founders on company-building fundamentals: developing a go-to-market strategy to help scale your business, thinking and acting strategically about customer feedback and product, pursuing partnerships and broadening your network, navigating pivots, hiring key talent, and helping you raise additional capital.

Our involvement adapts to each founder and company’s stage and needs. We aim to be a trusted and steady sounding board during moments of both celebration and transition. We have seen it all, hundreds of times, and will work together with you to navigate past the obstacles that will come your way.

Trilogy’s roots run deep in the Pacific Northwest. Long before we began investing, our founding partners spent decades building some of the region’s most important technology companies from the ground up. That journey began in the early days of wireless, when our founding partners helped launch and scale McCaw Cellular — from its founding to IPO and through its landmark $12.6B acquisition by AT&T. In the years that followed, our partners founded and operated many other influential mobile and communications businesses, notably Pacific Northwest Cellular, Western Wireless, and VoiceStream. Western Wireless was later acquired for $6B and became part of Verizon, while VoiceStream was acquired by Deutsche Telekom for $34B and evolved into what is now T-Mobile.

Our partnership also built and scaled leading enterprise companies such as ADIC, which exited in a $770M acquisition by Quantum. Members of our team helped form Microsoft’s developer division and led it during the creation of Microsoft Visual Studio.NET and Microsoft NET Framework. Our Managing Directors have also spent portions of their career at top-tier investment banks and management consulting firms, including JPMorgan Chase and Bain, amongst others. And of course, our connection to the region extends beyond technology — our founding partners have also helped steward one of the Pacific Northwest’s most iconic sports franchises, the Seattle Mariners.

This multi-decade operating legacy has shaped Trilogy’s investment philosophy. Founded in 2006, Trilogy was built on the belief that the Pacific Northwest produces enduring companies and that experienced operators can be uniquely valuable partners to the next generation of founders. Since then, we’ve invested in over 100 companies, deployed $300M+ in capital, and supported $2B+ in value creation. Today, our strategy remains the same: we back early-stage teams across the region and help them grow startups into the iconic companies that will define the next wave of global innovation.

We look for founders who deeply understand the problem they’re solving and have the conviction to move fast while staying grounded in customer feedback. Beyond the team, we care about markets that are large, expanding, and undergoing real change, where timing and technology shifts create new openings for scale. Finally, we focus on signs of momentum, however early: clear customer pull, strong engagement, or a product that solves an urgent pain point with simplicity and depth.

We look for founders with deep subject matter expertise, conviction, clarity of thought, and a bias toward execution. At the earliest stages, the team is the strategy; we care less about polished decks and more about how founders think, learn, and adapt. The strongest teams combine technical depth with business instinct, communicate with transparency, and attract people who raise the collective bar.

Above all, we look for founders who are problem-driven and willing to build deliberately, even when the path is uncertain.

We’re rooted in the Pacific Northwest — it’s where we live, work, and invest. Most of our portfolio is headquartered in Seattle, Bellevue, and the broader Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia region because we believe the PNW has a unique concentration of talent, technical depth, and operator culture. By staying focused here, we’re able to plug directly into the entrepreneurial ecosystem and be true partners as founders scale from early-stage startup to category-defining companies — just as so many PNW successes have before, from Remitly to Microsoft.

After nearly two decades of investing in and partnering with more than 100 companies, we’ve learned that great founders share a few enduring traits: they stay close to customers, move quickly, and maintain discipline through both good and difficult markets. Our team has lived through multiple waves of innovation — from our partners’ role in the mobile, web, and data evolution to our own investing experience across cloud, SaaS, and now AI — and we’ve seen that each wave is an opportunity that rewards teams who move at the speed of technology while building with intention and clarity. We aim to give startups both: the support of a partner who can match the pace of your most critical moments and the steadiness of a team that has helped build category-defining companies from the earliest stage.

The best way to reach our team is to introduce yourself here or to send us an email. Warm introductions through founders, investors, or operators in our network are always welcomed, but never required.

We are a small team and move nimbly in our investment process. We spend the most time getting to know you and ensuring that you (and your co-founder) have ample opportunity to get to know us as well. We do this through a series of conversations about your vision, your expertise in your market, your product and technology, and how you plan to reach customers.

With many founders, we begin these conversations at the very start of their entrepreneurial journeys—months or even quarters before their first fundraising. With others, we can move from first meeting to term sheet within weeks. The timeline is less important than ensuring we're the right partners for what you're building.