Mike Lynch, a British technology entrepreneur, is missing after his luxury yacht sank off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily.

After co-founding the British technology company Autonomy in 1996 and backing several successful technology companies, the businessman was considered by some to be the British answer to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

One person is dead and six are missing after a 56m superyacht named Bayesian, linked to Mr Lynch’s family, sank as a result of bad weather.

His wife, Angela Bacares, was rescued.

The British technology magnate became rich in 2011 by selling his company Autonomy for eleven billion dollars (8.6 billion pounds) to the US computer giant Hewlett-Packard (HP).

But for more than a decade after the spectacular takeover, Lynch faced a bitter legal battle.

In June, he was acquitted in the United States of numerous fraud charges that had threatened him with a prison sentence of two decades.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4 in August, Lynch said he believed he had only been able to prove his innocence in a US court because of his wealth.

The yacht’s sinking occurred on the same day that the lawyer for Lynch’s co-defendant in the fraud case, Stephen Chamberlain, confirmed his death after he was hit by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

Mr Lynch was born on June 16, 1965, the son of a nurse and a firefighter, and grew up near Chelmsford in Essex.

He studied natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in mathematical computer science and later received a research fellowship.

In 1991, Mr. Lynch helped found Cambridge Neurodynamics, a company specializing in computer-aided fingerprint capture and recognition.

Five years later, his technology company Autonomy was founded, which used a statistical method called “Bayesian inference” at the core of its software.

Mr. Lynch received numerous awards and honors for the company’s rapid growth and success in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In 2006 he was awarded the OBE in recognition of his services to the British economy.

He served as a non-executive member of the BBC Board and was appointed to the government’s Science and Technology Council in 2011, where he advised then Prime Minister David Cameron on the risks and opportunities of AI development.

After selling Autonomy to HP in 2011 – which raised an estimated £500 million for Mr Lynch – he founded technology investment firm Invoke Capital.

The venture capital fund invested in the founding of the British cybersecurity company Darktrace in 2013.

Mr. Lynch, a shareholder of the company, held a seat on the board of directors until earlier this year.

He and his wife have two daughters and live at Loudham Hall in Suffolk.

Autonomy’s success was based on its software’s ability to extract useful information from data such as phone calls, emails and videos.

This data could then be used, for example, to suggest answers to a call center agent or to monitor television channels for words or topics.

Before being acquired by HP in 2011, Autonomy was headquartered in San Francisco and Cambridge.

But the price came under scrutiny after the sale, and just one year later, Autonomy’s value was written down by billions.

In 2018, US prosecutors filed charges against Lynch, accusing him of artificially inflating the company’s value.

They said he concealed the company’s loss-making hardware reselling business and also accused him of intimidating or bribing people who raised concerns.

In early August, Mr Lynch told BBC Radio 4 that he had been convinced of his innocence throughout the long trial, He believed that he could only prove this in a US court because of his wealth.

“As a British citizen, you shouldn’t need financial means to protect yourself,” he said.

“The reason I’m sitting here, let’s be honest, is not just because of my innocence… but because I had enough money not to get swept up in a process that was designed to swept you away.”

He added that after the lengthy legal saga, he wanted to “get back to what I love doing, which is innovating.”