Following the sinking of his luxury yacht on Monday, Reuters has reported that the body of tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been recovered.Lynch was among six people who have been confirmed to have died when the yacht sank after being hit by a sea tornado, known as a waterspout, in the early hours of Monday 19 August off the coast of Sicily.At the time of writing, Reuters reported that Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter is still missing. On Wednesday, four bodies were recovered from the sunken yacht. Lynch’s former business partner, Stephen Chamberlain, died on Monday after being hit by a car while running.
Data analytics genius
In the fast-paced world of data analytics and the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Lynch played a significant role in advancing data science and data analytics both here in the UK and globally.
Lynch’s name and reputation are forever linked to the fate of Autonomy, a UK company that in the late 1990s was doing things with data insights that seemed almost impossible to achieve with the tech available at the time. Yet HP’s attempts to discredit him and Autonomy mean the technology – and the geniuses who developed it – have taken a back seat to the legal wranglings and fraud claims. The software developed by Autonomy lives on, after three changes of ownership, and is regarded as leading the document mining and analytics technology market.
While Lynch is most closely linked with Autonomy, which he co-founded in 1996, he is also a co-founder of security firm Darktrace, which uses artificial intelligence to tackle cyber security threats.
In 2013, he set up venture capital firm Invoke Ventures, which has funded a number of startups, including Darktrace and Sophia Genetics, a company specialising in data-driven medicine.
Lynch also founded Featurespace, a platform for fraud and financial crime management, Luminance, an artificial intelligence platform, and Hearable, an AI-driven mobile application for people with hearing loss.
Prior to setting up Autonomy, Lynch read natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he also gained a PhD and held a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition.
In 2011, he sold Autonomy to HP for £7.1bn. At the time, HP had ambitions to move out of the PC hardware business and become a software-focused company. But this strategy failed to win shareholder approval and led to the hardware maker filing a fraud case, which ended up in the US, where Lynch and the former Autonomy head of finance, Chamberlain, were charged with fiddling the accounts to increase the value of the business.
HP’s product brief for Autonomy’s flagship product, Idol, described the product as offering unique pattern matching powered by statistical algorithms that recognise distance in ideas, concepts and context in real time. Even with today’s advanced analytics, graph databases and AI, these are difficult things to achieve. The product was sold to Micro Focus and ended up as part of OpenText. Autonomy’s Idol lives on as OpenText Knowledge Discovery, which is considered the market leader according to the Forrester Wave for Document mining and analytics platforms, Q2 2024, published in May 2024, ahead of AI behemoths like Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.
Despite being a UK entrepreneur, the home secretary, Priti Patel, did nothing to stop Lynch being extradited to the US in 2022 to face trial. Former Tory ministers Andrew Mitchell, David Davis, Lord Maude of Horsham and Lord Deben, along with former Liberal Democrat business secretary Vince Cable, had previously written a letter to The Times describing how the extradition would be akin to the UK surrendering its sovereignty.
In June this year, Lynch was acquitted of all charges, following a 12-week trial in San Francisco, and it has been reported that the Sicily event aboard his luxury yacht, Bayesian, was held to celebrate the acquittal.
Most influential person in IT
In 2011, Lynch was voted in Computer Weekly’s UKtech50 as the most influential person in IT. At the time, he said the UK needed to realise how important IT is to its economy. Given that the country is small and has limited natural resources, he said it was absolutely necessary to invest in the UK’s intellectual and innovative abilities. These words are as true today as they were over two decades ago.
“I do believe that one of the most promising areas is around the use of IT know-how. And we do have world-class IT here: ARM, Autonomy, a series of up-and-coming businesses, world-class universities,” he said.
Strategic thinker
Last year, Lynch posted an article on LinkedIn in which he discussed the opportunities that AI tools like ChatGPT offer workers. In the article, he said: “Having next-generation AI that automates the menial, repetitive tasks that plague so many professions is no bad thing. It just requires humans to learn to work and think differently, to let go of the 90% of tasks that an AI could do better and focus on the 10% that an AI will never be able to replicate. Strategic thinking and creativity to name a couple.”
Lynch also said there is no reason why the UK cannot be part of the AI story: “We are home to three of the top 10 research universities in the world and world-class tech talent. With momentum around AI at fever pitch and the British government placing technology at the core of their growth ambitions, now is our moment to lean into this.”