Mike Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software company Autonomy. He was acquitted of fraud charges in June after defending himself in a trial over allegations he artificially inflated Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale to tech giant Hewlett Packard.
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LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch was found dead in the wreckage of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily earlier this week. He was 59 years old.
Just two months ago, Lynch won a stunning victory in a landmark trial in the US over allegations by Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company Autonomy when he sold it to the US tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.
Fears for Lynch’s life swirled earlier this week when he was reported missing after a yacht – later confirmed to belong to his wife, Angela Bacares – sank off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the province of Palermo in Italy.
Bacares was one of 15 people rescued after the yacht capsized earlier this week.
The moored vessel, a 56-meter (184-foot) sailing vessel named Bayesian, was hit by a severe storm early Monday morning.
Witnesses told local media that the boat, which had 10 crew and 12 passengers on board, went down quickly after its mast broke.
Lynch’s body was recovered from the wreckage of the yacht on Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC on Thursday. His daughter, Hannah, remains unidentified, according to the source, who asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the situation. Sky News had earlier reported the news.
“Bill Gates of Britain”
Born in Ilford, a large town in East London, to Irish parents in 1965, Lynch grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father a firefighter.
Lynch had a modest upbringing but, aged 11, was awarded a scholarship to attend Bancroft’s School, a private school in Woodford Green, East London.
Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, speaks at a Confederation of British Industry conference in London, UK, in 2003.
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From Bancroft’s, he attended Cambridge University, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas such as electronics, mathematics and biology.
After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed his Ph.D. in signal processing and communications.
In the late 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a company that produced audio designs and products for the music industry.
A few years later, in the early 1990s, he set up a fingerprint recognition business called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted South Yorkshire Police among its clients.
But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spinoff from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company has grown into one of Britain’s largest technology companies.
Autonomy’s software, which consists of pattern-matching algorithms, was touted as a solution that could help workers extract meaning from unstructured data, including web pages, email, video, audio and text.
These pattern recognition techniques were based on so-called Bayesian inference, a method of statistical inference named after a theorem developed by the 18th-century statistician Thomas Bayes.
Lynch’s luxury yacht, the Bayesian, takes its name from this mathematical model.
Autonomy founder Mike Lynch poses at the company’s former offices near Cambridge, UK, Thursday July 19, 2007.
Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Following the sale of his company to HP, Lynch became known by the British national media as “Britain’s Bill Gates”, a rare example of a British entrepreneur who successfully created and expanded a globally significant technology business by selling into various markets across the globe. world.
Legal battle with HP
However, Lynch’s reputation would continue to take a hit when the HP deal took a turn for the worse. In 2012, HP wrote down $8.8 billion in Autonomy’s value — just a year after buying it.
Lynch, who has long denied the allegations, was extradited from Britain to the US in 2023 to stand trial over HP’s allegations.
This was despite pressure on the UK government from Lynch’s supporters not to allow his extradition.
U.S. prosecutors had filed criminal charges including fraud and conspiracy for an alleged scheme to inflate Autonomy’s revenue since 2009, in part to lure a buyer.
However, in a stunning victory in June, Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges after trial. The trial lasted three months.
Mike Lynch leaves the Rolls Building in London following the civil case over the £8.4bn sale of software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. Picture date: Monday March 25, 2019.
Dominic Lipinski | PA Images | Getty Images
During the trial, Lynch took the stand in his defense. He denied wrongdoing and told jurors that HP blocked Autonomy’s integration.
Prosecutors had alleged that Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased chief financial officer Stephen Chamberlain, who was also killed in a tragic car crash on Saturday, paid off Autonomy’s finances in various ways.
These included back-dating agreements, concealing the company’s damaging activities by reselling hardware, and intimidating or paying people who raised concerns.
But Lynch told jurors he had focused on technology-related matters at Autonomy, not finance.
Accounting and financial decisions were left to Autonomy’s then chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, he said.
Hussain was separately convicted in the US in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud related to the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.
Lynch’s influence on UK technology
Alongside founding Autonomy, Lynch also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups. He founded Invoke in 2012.
It has become a key voice advocating for the UK tech industry, backing key names such as cyber security firm Darktrace and legal technology firm Luminance.
Publicly traded Darktrace, which had fended off similar revenue-inflating allegations from US short seller Quintessential Capital Management, earlier this year agreed to be acquired and taken private by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion dollars in cash.
Lynch was previously a board member of the British broadcaster BBC, and also once served as an adviser to the UK government on the Science and Technology Council.
In 2014 and 2015 he did The Forbes Billionaires Listwith an estimated net worth of $1 billion. However, while facing legal fees amid his dispute with HP, he delisted in 2016.
In addition to legal battles, Lynch had many hobbies to keep him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.
Mike Lynch, founder of software company Autonomy, at the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, UK, August 24, 2000.
Bryn Colton | Hulton Archive | Getty Images
“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn in 2016 interview. “I have cows that disappeared in the 1940s and pigs that nobody has kept since medieval times, and none of them have any Apple products at all.”
Before his death, Lynch had reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in eastern England, to recover from his legal battle in the US, the local The East Anglian Times reported.
Just weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper how he feared he would die in prison if found guilty of HP’s allegations.
“If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I knew it in any sense,” Lynch told the interview in the Times.
“It’s strange, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?” he added.
