British tech tycoon Mike Lynch was among seven people who died after the luxury superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily early on Monday morning
The 59-year-old is known for founding Invoke Capital and Autonomy Corporation and had been in the headlines after he was cleared of charges in a high-profile fraud case.
He was on the boat, named Bayesian, which sank in bad weather in the early hours of Monday near the Sicilian capital Palermo.
Once dubbed the “British Bill Gates”, Mr Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares were valued at £852m in 2023 by the Sunday Times Rich List.
Born in Ilford, east London to his Irish mother a nurse from County Tipperary and his father a firefighter from County Cork, he won a scholarship to the independent Bancroft’s school in Woodford Green at the age of 11.
He then went to Cambridge University and started his first business while studying for a PhD in signal processing and communications research.
The company, Lynett Systems, produced audio products for the music industry including electronic synthesisers and samplers.
His doctoral thesis, meanwhile, is reportedly one of the most widely-read research pieces in the Cambridge University Library.
In 1991, he started his second business, Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialised in fingerprint recognition and reportedly sold its machines to South Yorkshire Police, among others.
Autonomy grew out of that company – but its success vastly overshadowed what came before.
The firm was a pioneer of business data analysis, using machine learning and what Mr Lynch called “adaptive pattern recognition”.
It used a statistical method called “Bayesian inference” at the heart of its software, devised by the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes.
Autonomy was an immediate success. It floated in Brussels in 1998, and rode the technology boom around the turn of the millennium. In 2000, it gained listings 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, unlike many other tech firms at the time, and rode it out.
Over the next decade, it continued to grow and served vast swathes of the businesses world, with clients reportedly including Shell, BMW, the UK Parliament and several US government departments.
Mr Lynch was made an OBE for services to enterprise in 2006. That same year, he was appointed to the board of the BBC, and was later elected to then-prime minister Lord David Cameron’s council for science and technology in 2011.
He advised Lord Cameron on subjects including “the opportunities and risks of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the government’s role in the regulation of these technologies”.
But Autonomy wasn’t his only business success. After selling the software firm in a £8.64 billion deal in 2011, he became a founding investor in world-leading cyber AI Darktrace, the FTSE 100 cyber security company.
In 2012, Mike Lynch founded Invoke Capital to create, invest in and support world-leading fundamental technology businesses within Europe. His portfolio included Featurespace, the most advanced platform for fraud and financial crime management, Luminance, a leading artificial intelligence platform and most recently Hearable, an AI-driven mobile application for people with hearing loss.
But for most of his last 13 years Mr Lynch was fighting to clear his name, fiercely denying he had used accounting tricks to artificially inflate the value of Autonomy before its sale to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.
In 2023 he was even extradited to the US, where he was reportedly kept under 24-hour armed guard to ensure he did not leave the country.
He later told the Times: “I’d had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn’t know if I’d ever be coming back.”
The acquittal vindicated the 59-year-old, who left the court a free man on June 6. He boarded the yacht where he was last seen alive just two months later.
The yacht’s name, Bayesian, harks to the same model that was at the heart of Autonomy’s – and Mr Lynch’s – success.