“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 had boarded with 21 other passengers sank in the Mediterranean Sea on Monday morning. His body was found by divers after being missing for several days, along with his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, Morgan Stanley international chief executive Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy, and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, American jewelry designer Neda.

He will be remembered as one of the most exciting founders of a British technology company, and also for the ensuing legal battle that simmered for more than a decade after he made money from that invention.

“Mike saw opportunities before others could even see them – and he was often proven right when the world caught up with him and his ideas,” said Baroness Joanna Shields, a former executive at Google and Facebook. Assets.

“He was finally free to dream and invent again. His tragic death was all the more devastating for his family, our industry and this country.”

Lynch’s early years

Lynch was born in Ireland and grew up in Chelmsford, Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father was a fireman.

In 2016, Lynch said his father advised him to “find a job that doesn’t involve running into burning buildings.”

“He understood the importance of education, and that was something that was very much encouraged in my home,” Lynch said.

Lynch studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. His groundbreaking research in pattern recognition and adaptive technology, which he carried out as part of his PhD, helped him to found Cambridge Neurodynamics in 1991.

He received a loan of £2,000 ($2,600) from a music manager to start his business, and described how the man who “discovered one of the biggest rock groups in the world” lived in a Soho wine bar and “went on a drinking spree until 4am”.

“Fortunately, by the time I met him, he was already in the middle of his drinking binge, so he did his due diligence pretty quickly and loaned me the money right away,” Lynch said of his first financing success.

He later renamed the group Autonomy in 1996 before taking it public in 1998.

Lynch became a mammoth figure in British business after the turn of the century, and many described him as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates. He was an adviser to two prime ministers and was keen to question Lynch as one of the country’s biggest tech moguls.

Hewlett Packard scandal

Autonomy’s value rose rapidly in the 15 years after its founding, leading to its acquisition by California-based Hewlett Packard for $11.7 billion in 2011.

It was a tribute to years of hard work that culminated in a sale that reportedly earned Lynch £500 million ($640 million), but it was a sale that would shape his remaining years.

Within a year of the acquisition, HP wrote down Autonomy’s value by $8.8 billion as sales began to weaken, citing “accounting irregularities.”

HP argued that Lynch and his allies inflated Autonomy’s value before the sale through accounting tricks. Rather than selling software to customers, HP claimed, Lynch instead packaged hardware as part of his business at a loss.

Over the next decade, litigation raged on both sides of the Atlantic.

The UK’s Serious Fraud Office dropped the case against Lynch in 2015 on the grounds that there was “insufficient evidence” to secure a conviction.

In a civil case in London in 2022, a judge ruled in favor of HP’s claims, arguing that Lynch was “well aware” that he had misrepresented Autonomy’s financials.

HP claimed it lost $4 billion as a result of the acquisition and sought $5.1 billion in damages from Lynch in the British High Court. However, the judge said the damages would be significantly lower.

Lynch was placed under house arrest in July 2022 while awaiting extradition to the United States to face charges in a separate criminal trial. He spent a year in limbo before being able to defend himself in the States.

In June, a jury acquitted Lynch on 15 counts of fraud. Lynch’s lawyers successfully argued that prosecutors failed to prove he committed fraud to meet sales targets.

Other work

While fending off HP’s allegations in the 2010s, Lynch launched a career in venture capital, founding Invoke Capital in 2012. The venture capital firm has 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 tied to their holdings in Darktrace.

The group’s CEO, Poppy Gustafsson, served as corporate controller at Autonomy under Lynch.

Lynch was celebrating his acquittal with friends and family off the coast of Sicily when Baeysian’s superyacht, which he was on, was caught in violent storms early Monday morning.

He leaves behind his wife Angela Bacares and his other daughter.