Speaking in his first interview after being acquitted in a lengthy fraud trial, a jubilant Mike Lynch turned philosophical about the years that would follow the most turbulent period of his life.
“Now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?”
Lynch, 59, was pronounced dead on Thursday after the Bayesian superyacht he boarded with 21 other passengers sank in the Mediterranean on Monday morning. His body was found by divers after being declared missing for several days alongside his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah; Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy Bloomer; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, American jewelry designer Neda Morvillo.
He will be remembered as one of the U.K.’s most exciting tech founders, as well as for the ensuing legal battle that frothed for more than a decade after he cashed in on that creation.
“Mike saw possibilities before others could even conceive them—so often proven right as the world caught up with him and his ideas,” Baroness Joanna Shields, a former managing director at Google and Facebook, told Fortune.
“He was finally free again to dream and invent, making his tragic passing all the more devastating for his family, our industry, and this country.”
Lynch’s early years
Lynch was born in Ireland and raised in Chelmsford, Essex. His mother was a nurse, and his father was a firefighter.
Speaking in 2016, Lynch said his father gave him the advice to “get a job that doesn’t involve running into burning buildings.”
“He realized the importance of education; so that was something that was very much sort of fostered in my home,” Lynch said.
Lynch studied physics, mathematics, and biochemistry at Cambridge University. His groundbreaking research in pattern recognition and adaptive technology, which he conducted for his doctoral thesis, helped him found Cambridge Neurodynamics in 1991.
He received a £2,000 ($2,600) loan from a music manager to start his venture. Lynch detailed how the man, who, he said, “discovered one of the world’s largest rock groups,” lived in a Soho wine bar and would go “carousing until four in the morning.”
“Luckily, by the time I met him, he was well into his carousing, and so his due diligence was pretty quick, and he lent me the money on the spot,” Lynch said of his first funding win.
He would later spin the group into Autonomy in 1996 before taking it public in 1998.
Lynch became a mammoth figure in the U.K. business world after the turn of the century, leading to many labeling him as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates. He served as an advisor to two prime ministers, keen to pick his brain as one of the country’s biggest tech moguls.
Hewlett-Packard scandal
Autonomy soared in valuation in the 15 years following its creation, leading to its 2011 acquisition by California-based Hewlett-Packard for $11.7 billion.
Though he was toasting his years of hard work, culminating in a sale that reportedly bagged Lynch £500 million ($640 million), it would also define his remaining years.
Within a year of the acquisition, HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8 billion as revenues began to flag, citing “accounting irregularities.”
HP argued that Lynch and his allies had used accounting tricks to inflate Autonomy’s value before its sale. Rather than selling software to clients, HP claimed, Lynch was instead packaging hardware as part of its deals at a loss.
An ensuing legal battle played out on both sides of the Atlantic over the next decade.
The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office closed its case against Lynch in 2015, citing “insufficient evidence” to carry forward with a conviction.
In a 2022 London civil trial, a judge ruled in favor of HP’s claims, arguing Lynch was “well aware” that he had misrepresented Autonomy’s financial figures.
HP claimed it lost $4 billion as a result of the acquisition and sought $5.1 billion in damages from Lynch in the U.K.’s High Court. However, the judge said damages would be considerably lower than that sum.
Lynch was placed under house arrest in July 2022 while awaiting extradition to the U.S. to face charges in a separate criminal trial, spending a year in limbo before defending himself in the States.
In June, a jury acquitted Lynch on 15 fraud charges. Lynch’s lawyers successfully argued that prosecutors failed to prove that he had committed fraud to meet revenue targets.
Other work
While Lynch batted off HP’s allegations through the 2010s, he set about a career in venture capital, launching Invoke Capital in 2012. The VC firm funded companies such as British cybersecurity darling Darktrace and Luminance, an AI company that raised $40 million in April.
Much of Lynch and his family’s net worth in his later years was linked to their holdings in Darktrace.
The group’s CEO, Poppy Gustafsson, served under Lynch as a corporate controller at Autonomy.
Lynch was celebrating his acquittal off the coast of Sicily with friends and family when the Bayesian superyacht he was on ran into violent storms early on Monday morning.
He is survived by his wife, Angela Bacares, and his other daughter.
