Mike Lynch, once celebrated as the “Bill Gates of Great Britain”, is now one of the six missing people after his Luxury yacht sank in violent storm off the coast of Sicily. At the time of the disaster, Lynch had been trying to put more than a decade of legal entanglements behind him, which ended in June when he acquitted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

Lynch, 59, rose to prominence in the late 1990s with the development of his software company Autonomy, which helped companies quickly find information hidden in emails and other digital documents. In 2011, Lynch sold the company to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion, earning him $800 million and making him one of Britain’s richest people.

But the deal was later dubbed one of the “most notorious failed mergers and acquisitions” after HP discovered alleged accounting problems that led to Lynch’s firing by HP’s then-CEO Meg Whitman. HP claimed that Autonomy had exploited accounting errors to inflate its financials before the deal. Lynch staunchly denied these allegations.

The case dragged on for 12 years, ending in June 2024 when a jury in federal court in San Francisco found the defendants not guilty.

“I look forward to returning to the UK and getting back to what I love most – my family and innovation in my field,” Lynch said in a statement following the verdict.

Here you can find out everything you need to know about Lynch.

Which company did Mike Lynch start?

Lynch, who earned a doctorate in mathematical computer science from Britain’s University of Cambridge, co-founded a company called Cambridge Neurodynamics based on the co-founders’ work in pattern recognition. According to a 1997 Guardian article, the company used the technology to match fingerprints and car license plates.

From there, in 1996, Lynch co-founded Autonomy, which was based on a statistical model called Bayesian inference, named after a theorem by the 18th-century statistician Thomas Bayes. (Lynch’s luxury yacht was christened “Bayesian.”)

The company responded to the growing need of companies to sort and find information in the huge amounts of data generated by the increasing use of computers and digital documents.

Autonomy’s steady growth over its first decade led to Lynch being awarded one of Britain’s highest honours in 2006: the Office of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Lynch told The Guardian in 1997 that people didn’t really believe that Britain could produce a growing technology company

“I actually heard the comment: ‘England, software? I thought you made bone china,'” he told the newspaper.

What happened after HP acquired Autonomy?

HP initially celebrated the purchase as a major coup that would lead the company from Palo Alto, California, onto a promising new path. However, under then-CEO Meg Whitman, the company quickly regretted the purchase.

HP claimed it had discovered accounting irregularities and suffered losses of $8.8 billion in the Autonomy deal. Whitman eventually laid off Lynch and thousands of employees in 2012 as HP’s business performance waned.

For the past 12 years, Lynch has denied the allegations. In 2012, he told the Wall Street Journal that he was “blindsided” by the allegations and called them “completely and utterly false.”

What happened to Mike Lynch’s lawsuit?

Lynch maintained his innocence when he testified before a jury in a two-and-a-half-month trial in San Francisco earlier this year. U.S. Justice Department prosecutors called more than 30 witnesses to prove allegations that Lynch was guilty of accounting duplication and defrauded HP of billions of dollars.

As mentioned above, in June the jury found Lynch not guilty and promised to return to the UK to seek new ways of innovating.

Who is Mike Lynch’s wife?

Mike Lynch is married to Angela Bacares, who was among the people rescued from the Mediterranean after the yacht sank. Lynch and Bacares have two daughters. One of them, 18-year-old Hannah, is missing, according to the BBC.

Bacares, 57, owns shares in Darktrace, a British cybersecurity company she and Lynch co-founded, the Sun reported. She sat in the front row of the courtroom during her husband’s trial but generally preferred to stay out of the public eye, the Times of London reported in July.

“We decided that Angela would not be involved in the case. She was completely out of it. Her focus was on the family and the children,” Lynch told the Times last month.

— With reporting from the Associated Press.