Receive our free Morning Headlines email for breaking news from our reporters around the world

Sign up for our free Morning Headlines email

Sign up for our free Morning Headlines email

British tech magnate Mike Lynch was one of seven people who died after the luxury superyacht Bayesian sank off the coast of Sicily early Monday morning.

The 59-year-old is known for founding Invoke Capital and Autonomy Corporation and made headlines after being acquitted of charges in a high-profile fraud case.

He was on the boat, called Bayesian, which sank in bad weather near the Sicilian capital Palermo in the early hours of Monday morning.

Mr Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares, once dubbed the ‘British Bill Gates’, were valued at £852 million by the Sunday Times Rich List in 2023.

He was born in Ilford, East London, to a nurse’s mother and a firefighter’s father who lived in County Tipperary. At the age of 11 he won a scholarship to the independent Bancroft’s School in Woodford Green.

He then went to the University of Cambridge and started his first company while studying for a PhD in signal processing and communications research.

The company, Lynett Systems, produced audio products for the music industry, including electronic synthesizers and samplers.

His dissertation is reportedly one of the most widely read research works in the University of Cambridge library.

In 1991 he started his second company, Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialised in fingerprint recognition. He reportedly sold his devices to the South Yorkshire Police, among others.

Autonomy emerged from that company, but its success overshadowed everything that came before it.

The company was a pioneer in enterprise data analytics, using machine learning and what Lynch called “adaptive pattern recognition.”

It used a statistical method called “Bayesian inference” at the core of its software, devised by the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes.

Autonomy was an immediate success. Launched in Brussels in 1998, it benefited from the technological boom around the turn of the century. In 2000, it was listed on both the US Nasdaq stock exchange and later on the London Stock Exchange.

When the tech bubble burst, Autonomy struggled and dropped from the FTSE 100. But the company was already profitable, unlike many other tech companies, and held on.

Over the next decade, the company continued to grow, serving large swaths of the business community. Its clients reportedly included Shell, BMW, the British Parliament and several US government departments.

Mr Lynch was appointed an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2006 for services to business. That same year he was appointed to the BBC Board of Governors and in 2011 he was elected to the then Prime Minister Lord David Cameron’s Science and Technology Board.

He advised Lord Cameron on issues including ‘the opportunities and risks of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the role of government in regulating these technologies’.

But Autonomy wasn’t his only business success. After selling the software company for £8.64bn in 2011, he became a founding investor in leading cyber AI Darktrace, the FTSE 100 cyber security company.

In 2012, Mike Lynch founded Invoke Capital to create, invest in and support global, foundational technology companies in Europe. His portfolio includes Featurespace, the most advanced fraud and financial crime management platform, Luminance, a leading artificial intelligence platform and most recently Hearable, an AI-powered mobile application for people with hearing loss.

But Mr. Lynch has spent the last 13 years of his career fighting to clear his name, fiercely denying that he used accounting tricks to artificially inflate Autonomy’s value 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 guard by armed officers 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 if I would ever come back.”

The acquittal vindicated the 59-year-old, who left the court on June 6 as a free man. He boarded the yacht, where he was last seen alive just two months later.

The yacht’s name, Bayesian, refers to the same model that has been at the heart of Autonomy’s – and Mr Lynch’s – success.