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British tech mogul Mike Lynch is among 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 cleared of charges in a high-profile fraud case.
He was on board the ship, 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 £852 million 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 School in Woodford Green at the age of 11.
He then went to Cambridge University and started his first company while working on a PhD in signal processing and communications research.
Lynett Systems produced audio products for the music industry, including electronic synthesizers and samplers.
His doctoral thesis, meanwhile, is reportedly one of the most widely read research papers in Cambridge University Library.
In 1991 he launched his second company, Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialised in fingerprint recognition and reportedly sold its machines to South Yorkshire Police, among others.
Autonomy was born out of this venture, but its success has far eclipsed anything that came before it.
The company has pioneered the analysis of business data, using machine learning and what Mr. Lynch called “adaptive pattern recognition.”
At the heart of his software was a statistical method called “Bayesian inference,” devised by 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes.
Autonomy was an immediate success. The company went public in Brussels in 1998 and rode the tech boom at the turn of the millennium. In 2000, it was listed on both the Nasdaq in the US and later the London Stock Exchange.
When the tech bubble burst, Autonomy struggled and was delisted from the FTSE 100. But the company was already profitable, unlike many other tech companies at the time, and weathered the storm.
Over the next decade, the company continued to grow and served vast swathes of the business world, with clients including Shell, BMW, the British Parliament and several departments of the US government.
Mr Lynch was appointed OBE for services to business in 2006. In the same year he was appointed to the BBC board and was elected to the then Prime Minister Lord David Cameron’s science and technology council in 2011.
He advised Lord Cameron on topics 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 Darktrace, the FTSE 100 cybersecurity company and world leader in artificial intelligence.
In 2012, Mike Lynch founded Invoke Capital to build, invest in and support leading fundamental technology companies in Europe. His portfolio included Featurespace, the most advanced platform for managing fraud and financial crime; Luminance, a leading artificial intelligence platform; and most recently, Hearable, an AI-powered mobile app for the hearing impaired.
But for most of his last 13 years, Mr. Lynch has fought 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 United States, where he was reportedly kept under 24-hour armed guard 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 walked out of 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, refers to the same model that was at the heart of Autonomy’s – and Mr Lynch’s – success.
