British entrepreneur and investor Mike Lynch, cofounder of cybersecurity company Darktrace and software firm Autonomy, is believed to be among the five bodies found by rescue divers in the search of his yacht, which sank Monday in a violent storm off the coast of Sicily, the Telegraph reports. Fifteen people escaped the yacht before it capsized, while one person remains missing. The body of Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter is also believed to have been found.
Lynch, who has been referred to as “Britain’s Bill Gates”, was said to be aboard the boat to celebrate his criminal acquittal in the Californian courts, where he was accused of 15 counts of fraud.
The case related to the $11bn sale of Autonomy to US computing firm Hewlett-Packard in 2007, which — one year after the deal — took an $8.8bn writedown on the acquisition, alleging “serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy.”
Despite the controversy, many in UK tech believe that Lynch was a galvanising figure for the country’s entrepreneurs, who laid the ground for ambitious founders hoping to build impactful tech companies.
Building UK tech
Lynch studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, before going on to do a PhD in signal processing and communications, and later a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition.
He launched his first company Lynett Systems Ltd — which produced designs and hardware for the music industry — in the late 80s, then founded fingerprint recognition company Cambridge Neurodynamics in 1991.
In 1996, Lynch cofounded AI software firm Autonomy and took the company public in 1998. When he sold the company to HP nine years later, it was one of the three biggest exits for a European tech firm.
Lynch is reported to have personally made around $800m from the deal and used some of that money to launch VC firm Invoke Capital in 2012.
A year later, Invoke became a founding investor in cybersecurity company Darktrace, which went public in 2021. It has also backed AI legaltech Luminance and Sophia Genetics, a data-driven medicine platform.
Lynch has remained closely connected to the tech ecosystem in Cambridge, and sat on the board of Cambridge Enterprise, the university’s tech transfer office.
Edward Benthall, former chair of the organisation, and now chairperson of early stage fund Cambridge Innovation Capital, remembers inviting him to the board in 2010.
“Sir David Walker encouraged me to invite Mike to join, saying ‘he is far too busy to attend many meetings, but even a few minutes of Mike’s time will be invaluable.’ He was right. Mike encouraged us to think bigger, to make Cambridge one of the best places in the world to start a tech business,” he says.
“Mike cared about bringing benefit to the world through technology; he cared about the university supporting entrepreneurial academics; and he cared about the prosperity that this could bring to the UK if we could do it well. He demonstrated this care many times… but he demonstrated it to me, at a time when he was still extremely busy driving the Formula 1 race car that was Autonomy, by taking time to help me and others to raise our game.
Amelia Armour, partner at Cambridge VC fund Amadeus Capital Partners agrees that the Autonomy cofounder was a catalytic figure for UK entrepreneurs.
“Creating Darktrace in Cambridge and steering the business to one of the most successful floats in London was great evidence that we can build global technology companies in the UK,” she says. “Hopefully, his legacy will be that entrepreneurs will be inspired to replicate Darktrace and grow substantial businesses from our world-leading science base.”
Anne Glover, the cofounder of Amadeus, and formerly the chair of the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, adds that Lynch helped nurture individuals and new institutions, like the UK government’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, the Alan Turing Institute.
“He has nurtured many talented leaders, like Poppy Gustafsson, the CEO of DarkTrace, who will continue to act as role models for the next generation of entrepreneurs,” she tells Sifted. “Later in his career he contributed significantly to the wider ecosystem through his membership of Cambridge University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, arguing strongly for the setup of the Turing Institute.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday, Brent Hoberman, cofounder of London VC firm Firstminute Capital, reflected on how Lynch was an unusual figure in UK tech, who combined technical know-how with business acumen.
“We often say in Britain that we don’t take great ideas and technology and comercialise them well… What he is is someone with a deep scientific and mathematical brain who also was able to build very successful businesses.”
Controversy
While Lynch undoubtedly helped kickstart a new generation of ambitious tech founders in the UK, his career was also characterised by controversy.
Despite being acquitted of criminal charges by the Californian courts, the businessman was still fighting to clear his name.
In 2018, Autonomy’s former finance director Sushovan Hussain was sentenced to five years in prison in the US for fraud connected to the HP deal. Then, in 2022, Lynch lost a civil fraud case brought by HP in the UK, in which it was ruled that it was not possible that the founder was unaware of fraud at the company, and that he had exerted control over Hussain.
Lynch appealed the ruling, but one consultant who worked on the HP Autonomy deal in the late 2000s, who asked not to be named, tells Sifted that the story “didn’t necessarily do a great deal of good things for the UK tech sector. It was pretty bad for our reputation as well”.
They add that, despite being a magnetic personality and leader, Lynch was often difficult to work with.
“He was a very smart guy. He had a brilliant PhD thesis and was a really good businessman. He was a very charismatic guy — a guy you sort of wanted to be close to because there was an aura around him,” they tell Sifted.
“But, Mike Lynch was an absolute nightmare to deal with as an advisor. I don’t think that’s a secret. He was a very, very tough guy to deal with.”
Benthall says he’ll remember Lynch for “his kindness, his generosity and his wit. He was a colossus in the UK tech world and I doubt we will ever see his like again. His impact was enormous.”
Whatever his professional reputation, Lynch has had a significant impact on UK entrepreneurship, showing that it was possible to build large tech companies outside of the US, and that those success stories could have positive knock-on effects for the next wave of founders.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/mike-lynch-tech-legacy/
