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British tech mogul Mike Lynch was among seven people killed after the luxury yacht Paisian sank off the coast of Sicily early Monday morning.
The 59-year-old is best known for founding Invoke Capital and Autonomy Corporation and was in the headlines after being acquitted of charges in a high-profile fraud case.
He was on board the boat, called the “Paizian”, which sank in bad weather in the early hours of Monday morning near Palermo, the capital of Sicily.
Lynch and his wife Angela Bakaris were once called the “Britain’s Bill Gates”, and their fortune was estimated at £852 million in 2023 according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
Born in Ilford, east London, to an Irish nurse mother from County Tipperary and a firefighter father from County Cork, he won a scholarship to the independent Bancroft School in Woodford Green when he was eleven.
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 synthesizers and samplers.
Meanwhile, his doctoral thesis is said to be one of the most widely read papers 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 has greatly overshadowed what came before it.
The company was a pioneer in business data analytics, using machine learning and what Mr. Lynch called “adaptive pattern recognition.”
The company used a statistical method called Bayesian inference at the heart of its software, which was invented by the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes.
Autonomy was an immediate success. It floated on the Brussels Stock Exchange in 1998, riding the wave of the tech boom at the turn of the millennium. In 2000, it listed on the US Nasdaq and then the London Stock Exchange.
When the tech bubble burst, Autonomy ran into financial difficulties and was dropped from the FTSE 100. But the company was actually profitable, unlike many other tech companies at the time, and weathered the crisis.
Over the next decade, the company continued to grow and served a wide range of business sectors, with clients reportedly including Shell, BMW, the British Parliament, and several US government departments.
In 2006, Mr Lynch was awarded an OBE for services to business. In the same year, he was appointed to the Board of the BBC and in 2011 was elected to the then Prime Minister Lord David Cameron’s Council for Science and Technology.
He also advised Lord Cameron on topics including “the opportunities and risks associated with the development of artificial intelligence and the role of government in regulating these technologies”.
But Autonomy wasn’t his only commercial success. After selling the software company in a £8.64bn deal in 2011, he became a founding investor in Darktrace, the world’s leading cyber AI company and a FTSE 100 cybersecurity company.
In 2012, Mike Lynch founded Invoke Capital to build, invest and support world-leading core technology companies in Europe. His portfolio has included Featurespace, the world’s most advanced fraud and financial crime management platform, Luminance, a leading AI platform, and most recently Hearable, an AI-powered mobile app for people with hearing loss.
But for much of the last 13 years of his life, Lynch was fighting to clear his name, vehemently denying that he used accounting tricks to artificially inflate the value of Autonomy before selling it to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.
In 2023 he was extradited to the United States, where he was reportedly kept under 24-hour armed guard to ensure he did not leave the country.
“I had to say goodbye to everything and everyone, because I didn’t know if I was going to come back or not,” he later told The Times.
The 59-year-old was acquitted by the court and walked free 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 has been at the heart of Autonomy’s success – and Mr. Lynch’s.
“Travel specialist. Typical social media scholar. Friend of animals everywhere. Freelance zombie ninja. Twitter buff.”
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