British tech magnate Mike Lynch was among seven people who died when the luxury superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily early Monday.
The 59-year-old is known for founding Invoke Capital and Autonomy, and made headlines after he was acquitted of charges in a high-profile fraud case.
He was on board the Bayesian, which sank in bad weather early Monday morning near the Sicilian capital Palermo.
Mr Lynch, once dubbed the “British Bill Gates”, and his wife Angela Paycares were estimated to be worth £852million in 2023 in the Sunday Times Rich List.
Born in Ilford, east London, to his Irish mother a nurse from County Tipperary and his father a fireman from County Cork, he won a scholarship to the independent Bancroft School in Woodford Green at the age of 11.
He then started his first career while studying for a PhD in signal processing and communications research at Cambridge University.
Lynette Systems was a company that produced audio products for the music industry, including electronic synthesizers and samplers.
Meanwhile, his doctoral dissertation is one of the most widely read pieces of research in the Cambridge University Library.
In 1991, he started his second business, Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialized in fingerprint recognition and reportedly sold its machines to South Yorkshire Police.
Autonomy grew out of that institution—but its success largely overshadowed what came before.
The company pioneered business data analytics, using machine learning, which Mr Lynch called “adaptive pattern recognition”.
It used a statistical method called “Bayesian inference” devised by the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes at the core of its software.
Autonomy was an immediate success. It floated in Brussels in 1998, and rode the technological boom at the turn of the millennium. In 2000, it was listed on both the US Nasdaq exchange and later the London Stock Exchange.
When the tech bubble burst, Autonomy struggled, dropping out of the FTSE 100. But the company was already profitable and, unlike many tech companies at the time, pulled it out.
Over the next decade, it continued to grow and serve a wider swath of the business world, with clients including Shell, BMW, the UK Parliament and several US government departments.
Mr Lynch became an OBE for services to the company in 2006. In the same year, he was appointed to the board of the BBC and then in 2011 was elected to the then Prime Minister Lord David Cameron’s Science and Technology Council.
He advised Lord Cameron on matters including “the opportunities and risks of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the role of government in regulating these technologies”.
But Autonomy was not his only business success. After selling the software company in an £8.64 billion deal in 2011, he became a founding investor in FTSE 100 cyber security company Darktrace, the world’s leading cyber AI.
In 2012, Mike Lynch founded Invoke Capital to build, invest in and support world-leading basic technology businesses within Europe. His portfolio includes FeatureSpace, a highly advanced platform for fraud and financial crime management, Luminance, a leading artificial intelligence platform, and Hearable, an AI-driven mobile app for the hearing impaired.
But in his last 13 years Mr Lynch has struggled to clear his name, strongly denying he used accounting tricks to artificially inflate the value of Autonomy before it was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.
He was extradited to the United States in 2023, where he was reportedly placed under 24-hour armed custody to ensure he did not leave the country.
He later told The Times: “I had to say goodbye to everything and everyone because I didn’t know I’d ever come back.”
The acquittal vindicated the 59-year-old, who walked out of court on June 6 a free man. Two months later he was last seen alive on board a boat.
The boat’s name, Bayesian, emphasizes the same model that was at the heart of Autonomy’s – and Mr Lynch’s – success.
