Chris Lynch

Chris Lynch is the cofounder and Managing Partner of Arsenal Collective, a venture fund investing in weapons and hard defense technologies that keep America and its allies safe. He was the founding director of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) at the Pentagon, where he served under Secretaries of Defense Ash Carter and Jim Mattis, introducing modern software practices to tackle national security challenges. In this role, Lynch led groundbreaking initiatives building hardware for the warfighter, including counter-drone technologies and biometric threat detection platforms. Lynch and his teams also created “Hack the Pentagon,” the federal government’s first-ever cybersecurity bug bounty program, and spearheaded the $10B JEDI Cloud project to modernize DoD’s cloud infrastructure. A serial entrepreneur, he co-founded Rebellion Defense, an early leader in defense-tech software-focused startup delivering mission-critical solutions for defense and intelligence agencies.