British technology entrepreneur, Mike Lynch, the founder of Cambridge tech firm Autonomy, once Europe’s largest software company, was found dead yesterday (Wednesday 21 August) two days after the yacht he was holidaying on sank in stormy weather off the coast of Sicily.
His 18-year-old daughter, Hannah (whose body is yet to be recovered), and five others also died following the vessel’s capsizing, while his wife, Angela Bacares, and 14 others were rescued. He is also survived by one other daughter.
The yacht Bayesian was moored half-a-mile off the coast of Porticello, Sicily when it sank rapidly in severe weather at 5am on Monday 19 August. The yacht’s name derives from the Bayesian theory, which Mike’s PhD and the software he created were based on.
Ready to ‘start again’
Mike, 59, whose body was officially identified today, was in his own words getting ready to ‘start again’ following his acquittal on fraud charges in the US relating to Hewlett-Packard’s purchase of his company, Autonomy.
The sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for nearly £9bn led to accusations of fraud and resulted in civil litigation in the UK and his extradition to the US. He went on trial in March 2024 and was found not guilty of all charges in June 2024.
He was one of AIT’s first 25 interviews when Richard Sharpe met with him in his London office on January 31 2017.
Born in Ilford, Essex in June 1965 to Irish parents; his mother a nurse and his father a firefighter, he won a scholarship to Bancroft School, studying maths, further maths, physics and chemistry. It was while at Bancroft that his love for music and curiosity for new inventions led to a career in technology and entrepreneurship.
His maths teacher was key to this and managed to get an old teletype printer connected to the university at Queen Mary College, London, with an old, acoustic modem and acoustic coupler. So, he started writing programs ‘long before anyone had ever heard about this’. Initially this was done on punch cards, which he told AIT was very annoying because if they made one mistake, it came back the next day and wouldn’t run.
The school then acquired a teletype machine and he built a Compukit UK101, which was a sort of precursor of the BBC Micro and this he said in his interview was all happening in the 1970s before it was obvious that computers were interesting.
Designing his own synthesizer
“When I was at school, I was a musician and there was a new kind of instrument came out called a digital sampler … and the problem with a digital sampler was that they cost £100,000 and I worked out that with my paper round it would take me a few hundred years to get one of these. So, I set out to build one, which without realising it made me one of the few people in the world doing things with digital signal processing chips, designed for the front end of missiles at the time.”
After creating his own synthesizer design someone heard about it and bought the design: “It was incredible training because it’s all real time, all assembler code, multiple processors and they were I suspect, probably the most complex thing on the planet at the time. And that’s how I got started and it was an introduction to business as people were paying for the design and that was funding me to learn more. That was my first foray into commercialisation of technology and that continued, much to my Cambridge college annoyance as an undergraduate.”
In 1983, Mike went to study natural sciences at Christ’s College, Cambridge and while there he met Peter Rayner, who had become an apprentice in signal processing and worked his way up to become one of the world experts in that field. Mike was very interested in his class, because he was desperate to continue to build synthesisers, and the big transition then was to use digital methods. He found Peter to be an absolutely wonderful mentor who let him get on with interesting things. Mike completed a PhD in adaptive techniques in connectionist models, which is what would now be called machine learning.
Neurodynamics
In 1991, Mike formed a new company, Neurodynamics, which was about fingerprint recognition. He realised that very similar mathematics to that he was already using could solve the problem of fingerprint matching. In those days, most fingerprint matching was done manually, which meant 30 or 40 highly-trained fingerprint experts had to go through the files for about three weeks to see if they could find a match. Mike helped build a machine, again on digital signal processors, that would do the matching in about five minutes.
It was demonstrated to an interested policeman and he loved it: “And the fact that we were two people and not IBM didn’t really matter, because he tested the machine, it worked and he bought it, and it changed policing for him.” The company consisted of Mike and a ‘chap’ who he had employed to work with him.
Autonomy
In 1996, in response to a request from the police, Neurodynamics developed software called the DRE, the Dynamic Reasoning Engine, which soon became Autonomy. They realised that it was applicable to much more than its initial purpose because in those days there was very little ability to handle textual information in a computer, and most of the world’s information is textual. Autonomy moved from start-up to establishing itself as the UK’s largest software business before being sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. During this time Mike was made an OBE for services to enterprise in the 2006 New Year Honours list.
Following this, in 2012 Mike launched Invoke Capital based on the principle that young entrepreneurs should be concentrating on ‘the clever bits’ and not running the sales force or the customer support desk: that’s what Invoke would do.
One of Invoke Capital’s success stories was cybersecurity firm, Darktrace, which they funded as a start-up at a valuation of ‘a few million’. In 2017, just two years after launching, it was worth more than $500m and now it’s in the process of being taken private by US private equity group Thoma Bravo for $5.3 billion.
Mike was incredibly well-regarded in the tech industry – described by some as the UK’s equivalent to Bill Gates – and following his acquittal earlier this year, many in the sector were excited to see what he would go onto achieve in the next phase of his life.
In a recent interview, he said that aside from furthering his technology career he wanted to change the extradition laws between the UK and US following his own extradition in May last year, which resulted in 13 months’ house arrest in San Francisco. He was reported as saying he wanted to fund a British equivalent of the Innocence Project, a US non-profit that works to gain the release of people it believes have been wrongfully convicted.
Mike Lynch OBE, June 1965 to August 2024.
Words by Adrian Murphy
