Finance

Mike Lynch, man once dubbed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates,’ dies at age 59

Published

3 months ago

August 22, 2024

Mike Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He was acquitted of fraud charges in June after defending himself in a trial over allegations that he artificially inflated Autonomy’s value in an $11.7 billion sale to tech giant Hewlett Packard.

Chris Ratcliffe | Bloomberg | Getty Images

LONDON — British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been found dead in the wreckage of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily earlier this week. He was 59 years old.

Just two months ago, Lynch won a stunning victory in a landmark U.S. trial over allegations from Hewlett Packard that he had artificially inflated the value of his company Autonomy when he sold it to the U.S. enterprise tech giant for $11.7 billion in 2011.

Fears for Lynch’s life swirled earlier this week when he was reported missing after the sinking of a yacht — later confirmed as owned by his wife Angela Bacares — off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the province of Palermo in Italy.

Bacares was one of 15 people rescued rescued following the yacht’s collapse earlier this week.

The anchored vessel, a 56-meter (184 feet) sailing yacht named the Bayesian, was hit by a violent storm early Monday morning.

Witnesses told local media the anchored boat, which was carrying 10 crew members and 12 passengers, descended rapidly after its mast broke.

Lynch’s body was retrieved from the wreckage of the yacht Wednesday, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC Thursday. His daughter, Hannah, remains unaccounted for, according to the source, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the situation. Sky News earlier reported the news.

‘Britain’s Bill Gates’

Born in Ilford, a large town in East London, to Irish parents in 1965, Lynch grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex. His mother was a nurse and his father was a fireman.

Lynch had a modest upbringing but, at the age of 11, he was awarded a scholarship to attend Bancroft’s School, a private school in Woodford Green, East London.

Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy, speaks at a Confederation of British Industry conference in London, U.K., in 2003.

Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images

From Bancroft’s, he attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas including electronics, mathematics and biology.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signals processing and communications.

Toward the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded Lynett Systems Ltd., a firm which produced designs and audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition business called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted the South Yorkshire Police among its customers.

But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spinoff from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company scaled into one of Britain’s biggest tech firms.

Autonomy’s software, made up of pattern-matching algorithms, was touted as a solution that could help employees abstract meaning from unstructured data, including web pages, email, video, audio, and text.

These pattern recognition techniques were based on so-called Bayesian inference, a method of statistical inference named after a theorem developed by 18th century statistician Thomas Bayes.

Lynch’s luxury yacht, the Bayesian, was named after this mathematical model.

Autonomy founder Mike Lynch poses at the company’s then-offices near Cambridge, U.K, on Thursday, July 19, 2007.

Graham Barclay | Bloomberg | Getty Images

After the sale of his company to HP, Lynch became known by U.K. national media as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” serving as a rare example of a U.K. businessman who successfully built and scaled a globally significant tech business selling into various markets around the world.

Legal battle with HP

However, Lynch’s reputation would go on to take a hit after the deal with HP took a turn for the worse. In 2012, HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy — just a year after buying it.

Lynch soon became the target of a protracted legal battle with the U.S. tech giant, with HP suing Lynch for $5 billion in damages over accusations that Lynch had inflated Autonomy’s sales by about $700 million.

Lynch, who had long denied the allegations, was extradited from Britain to the U.S. in 2023 to stand trial over the HP allegations.

This came despite pressure on the U.K. government from Lynch’s supporters not to allow his extradition.

U.S. prosecutors had filed criminal charges including wire fraud and conspiracy for an alleged scheme to inflate Autonomy’s revenue starting in 2009, partly to entice a buyer.

However, in a stunning victory in June, Lynch was acquitted of fraud charges following trial. The trial lasted three months.

Mike Lynch leaves the Rolls Building in London following the civil case over his £8.4 billion sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011. Picture date: Monday March 25, 2019.

Dominic Lipinski | PA Images | Getty Images

During the course of the trial, Lynch took the stand in his own defense. He denied wrongdoing and told jurors that HP botched Autonomy’s integration.

Prosecutors had alleged Lynch, along with Autonomy’s now-deceased finance executive Stephen Chamberlain, who also died in a tragic car crash Saturday, padded Autonomy’s finances in a number of ways.

These included back-dated agreements, concealing the firm’s loss-making business by reselling hardware, and intimidating or paying off individuals who had raised concerns.

However, Lynch told jurors he had focused on tech-related matters at Autonomy, not finances.

Accounting and money decisions were left to Autonomy’s then-chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, he said.

Hussain was separately convicted in the U.S. in 2018 on charges of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud related to the HP deal. He was released from prison in January after serving a five-year sentence.

Lynch’s influence on UK tech

Alongside founding Autonomy, Lynch also runs Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups. He founded Invoke in 2012.

He became a key voice supporting the U.K. technology industry, backing key names like cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal tech firm Luminance.

Publicly listed Darktrace, which had fended off similar allegations of inflating its revenue by U.S. short seller Quintessential Capital Management, earlier this year agreed to a deal to be bought out and taken private by U.S. private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $5.32 billion in cash.

Lynch was previously on the board of U.K. broadcaster BBC, and once also served as an advisor to the U.K. government on the Council for Science and Technology.

In 2014 and 2015, he made the Forbes’ billionaires list, with an estimate net worth of $1 billion. However, while facing legal costs amid his dispute with HP, he dropped off that list in 2016.

Legal struggles aside, Lynch had several hobbies to keep him busy, including keeping and caring for cattle and pigs at his home in Suffolk.

Mike Lynch, founder of software firm Autonomy, at the company’s headquarters in, Cambridge, U.K., Aug. 24, 2000.

Bryn Colton | Hulton Archive | Getty Images

“I keep rare breeds,” Lynch told LeadersIn in a 2016 interview. “I have cows that became defunct in the 1940s and pigs that no one has kept since the medieval times and none of them have any Apple products whatsoever.”

Prior to his passing, Lynch had reportedly returned to his farm in Suffolk, a county in the east of England, to recover from his U.S. legal battle, the local East Anglian Times newspaper reported.

Just weeks before he was reported missing, Lynch told The Times newspaper of how he feared dying in prison if found guilty over the HP allegations.

“‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of my life as I have known it in any sense,” Lynch said in the interview with The Times.

“It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life – the question is, what do you want to do with it?” he added.

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Fintech unicorns watch Klarna IPO for signs of when window will reopen

Published

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Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless.

Zed Jameson | Bloomberg | Getty Images

LISBON, Portugal — Financial technology unicorns aren’t in a rush to go public after buy now, pay later firm Klarna filed for a U.S. IPO — but they’re keeping a watchful eye on it for signs of when the market will open up again.

Last week, Klarna made a confidential filing to go public in the U.S., ending months of speculation over where the Swedish digital payments firm would list. Timing of the IPO is still unclear, and Klarna has yet to decide on pricing or the number of shares it’ll issue to the public.

Still, the development drew buzz from fintech circles with market watchers asking if the move marks the start of a resurgence in big fintech IPOs. For now, that doesn’t appear to be the case — however, founders say they’ll be watching the IPO market, eyeing pricing and eventually stock performance closely.

Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO of online payments startup GoCardless, said last week that it’s not yet time for his company to fire the starting gun on an IPO. He views listing as more of a milestone on a journey than an end goal.

“The markets have been challenging over the last few years,” Takeuchi, whose business GoCardless was last valued at over $2 billion, said in a CNBC-moderated panel at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

“We need to be focused on building a better business,” Takeuchi added, noting that “the rest will follow” if the startup gets that right. GoCardless specializes in recurring payments, transactions that come out of a consumer’s bank account in a routine fashion — such as a monthly donation to charity.

Lucy Liu, co-founder of cross-border payments firm Airwallex, agreed with Takeuchi and said it’s also not the right time for Airwallex to go public. In a separate interview, Liu directed CNBC to what her fellow Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang has said previously — that the firm expects to be “IPO-ready” by 2026.

“Every company is different,” Liu said onstage, sat alongside Takeuchi on the same panel. Airwallex is more focused on becoming the best it can be at solving friction in global cross-border payments, she said.

An IPO is a goal in the company’s trajectory — but it’s not the final milestone, according to Liu. “We’re constantly in conversations with our investors shareholders,” she said, adding that will change “when the time is right.”

‘Stars aligning’ for fintech IPOs

One thing’s for sure, though — analysts are much more optimistic about the outlook for fintech IPOs now than they were before.

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“We outlined five handles to open the [IPO] window, and I think those stars are aligning in terms of the macro, interest rates, politics, the elections are out the way, volatility,” Navina Rajan, senior research analyst at private market data firm PitchBook, told CNBC.

“It’s definitely in a better place, but at the end of the day, we don’t know what’s going to happen, there’s a new president in the U.S.,” Rajan continued. “It will be interesting to see the timing of the IPO and also the valuation.”

Fintech companies have raised around 6.2 billion euros ($6.6 billion) in venture capital from the beginning of the year through Oct. 30, according to PitchBook data.

Jaidev Janardana, CEO and co-founder of British digital bank Zopa, told CNBC that an IPO is not an immediate priority for his firm.

“To be honest, it’s not the top of mind for me,” Janardana told CNBC. “I think we continue to be lucky to have supportive and long-term shareholders who support future growth as well.”

He implied private markets are currently still the most accommodative place to be able to build a technology business that’s focused on investing in growth.

However, Zopa’s CEO added that he’s seeing signs pointing toward a more favorable IPO market in the next couple of years, with the U.S. likely opening up in 2025.

That should mean that Europe becomes more open to IPOs happening the following year, according to Janardana. He didn’t disclose where Zopa is looking to go public.