Aaron Henshaw

Aaron Henshaw is a serial entrepreneur, technical founder, and active angel investor specializing in frontier technology. He co-founded Grand St., a marketplace for creative technology products, which was acquired by Etsy in 2014. Following the acquisition, he led engineering for Maker Innovation at Etsy. His career has been defined by building and scaling infrastructure at the intersection of technology and emerging markets, with deep expertise in full-stack development, product development, and blockchain systems.

In 2018, Henshaw co-founded Bison Trails alongside Joe Lallouz, building a blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service platform that enabled participants to run secure nodes across multiple blockchain networks. Bison Trails raised approximately $30 million across seed and Series A rounds from investors including Galaxy Digital, Initialized Capital, Accomplice, and Coinbase Ventures. In January 2021, Coinbase acquired Bison Trails in a deal valued at approximately $457 million. After the acquisition, Bison Trails was rebranded as Coinbase Cloud, where Henshaw served as Head of Engineering overseeing infrastructure that managed over 60,000 hosted nodes across more than 30 blockchains with over $30 billion staked. Henshaw and co-founder Lallouz departed Coinbase in January 2023.

Alongside his operating career, Henshaw co-founded Ambush Capital in 2015 with Joe Lallouz and Carly Strife. The Brooklyn-based angel fund focuses on helping entrepreneurs through the earliest stages of company building, investing across crypto, AI, space, life sciences, robotics, and infrastructure/SaaS. Ambush Capital has deployed $9.9 million across approximately 116 companies and has generated standout returns including the Solana seed round (~1,000x), Near seed round (~40x), Eigen seed round (~40x), and Aleo seed round (~25x).

Henshaw invests at the seed and pre-seed stages with a strong bias toward frontier technology. Through Ambush Capital and his personal angel investing, he gravitates toward founders building foundational infrastructure -- particularly in blockchain, crypto, and decentralized systems -- though the fund's mandate spans AI, robotics, space, and life sciences. His investment approach is informed by his own experience as a repeat technical founder who has built and exited multiple startups, giving him a practitioner's perspective on early-stage infrastructure challenges. He looks for deep technical teams tackling large-scale platform opportunities.