Rebellion Defense

Rebellion Defense is a Washington-based defence-software company founded in 2019 by Chris Lynch, formerly head of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service, together with Nicole Camarillo and Oliver Lewis. Backed by Insight Partners and Venrock, with Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems among its investors, it raised a $150 million round in 2021 at a billion-dollar valuation and became one of the more visible Silicon Valley bets on military AI. Schmidt and Murdoch both sat on its board.

The company’s two named products serve different missions. Iris is its AI platform for the battlefield: multi-domain target recognition and tracking, predictive analytics, and adaptive mission planning, including automated pairing of assets to objectives. Nova is a cybersecurity tool that emulates adversary attacks to find network risk at scale, and earned a Department of Defense Impact Level 5 authorisation to test on military networks. Of the two, Iris has driven the company’s recent contract wins, chiefly a series of US Navy target-recognition awards.

Rebellion’s trajectory has been turbulent. An early contributor to Project Maven, it saw that work reported as a disappointment, and in 2023 it cut roughly a third of its staff, closed its UK operations, and parted ways with co-founder Lynch; investor and executive chairman Ben FitzGerald is now listed as chief executive. The surviving company is a smaller, US-focused outfit that continued to win Navy work into 2025. Its broader story is one of an early defence-AI challenger that lost the flagship targeting-software race to Palantir — whose Maven Smart System went on to anchor the Pentagon’s effort — and refocused on narrower niches.