Tributes paid to ‘UK’s biggest tech entrepreneur’

Buddies and colleagues of Mike Lynch have paid tribute to him, with the demise of the tech tycoon in a luxurious yacht sinking off the coast of Sicily being described as an “irreplaceable loss”.

The British businessman, 59, was amongst these killed when the Bayesian yacht foundered in stormy climate early on Monday.

The our bodies of 4 others have been recovered, and a sixth particular person – believed to be Mr Lynch’s daughter Hannah, 18, continues to be lacking.

Mr Lynch was a outstanding determine within the UK tech trade, the place his backing of profitable firms led to him being dubbed the British equal of Microsoft founder Invoice Gates.

Nonetheless, he later turned embroiled in a long-running authorized dispute which resulted in him being controversially extradited to the US, earlier than being acquitted earlier this summer season.

Former Solar newspaper editor David Yelland mentioned Mr Lynch was “an irreplaceable loss not solely to people who beloved him but in addition to the nation”.

“He’s the UK’s biggest tech entrepreneur of latest a long time, a household man, a long-time consumer of my enterprise and a buddy,” he mentioned.

“To assume Mike Lynch misplaced his life simply as he started to rebuild it’s devastating for all people who know him.”

Mr Lynch is survived by his spouse Angela Bacares, who was rescued after the yacht sank. They lived on the Loudham Corridor property in Suffolk.

Brent Hoberman, co-founder of Lastminute.com, described his demise as “tragic”, saying Mr Lynch had way more to offer to the UK tech scene.

“He was nonetheless on his journey, and he’d been sidetracked for a decade with this courtroom case,” he informed the BBC.

“I feel there was a variety of unfulfilled potential.”

IT analyst Richard Holway mentioned in a put up on LinkedIn that Mr Lynch – a buddy of greater than 25 years – was “a novel British tech expertise”.

“Goodness is aware of what he might have achieved subsequent,” he added.

Mr Lynch co-founded tech agency Autonomy in 1996, which expanded quickly and was offered to Hewlett Packard for $11bn (£8.6bn) in 2011, from which he’s believed to have netted £500m.

He then established tech agency Invoke Capital, which helped create outstanding UK cybersecurity agency Darktrace in 2013. Lynch had a seat on its board till earlier this 12 months.

However questions over the sale of Autonomy led to a long-running authorized battle.

In 2022, Mr Lynch misplaced a civil fraud case in opposition to HP on the Excessive Courtroom in London.

A day later, he was extradited to the US as a part of legal proceedings, and was going through a potential twenty years in jail.

He was acquitted in June this 12 months after a jury discovered him not responsible of the crimes.

He informed BBC Radio 4 that although he was satisfied of his innocence, he was solely capable of show it in a US courtroom as a result of he was wealthy sufficient to pay the large authorized charges concerned.

Mr Lynch is reported to have gone on the yacht journey along with his household to have a good time securing his freedom.

Its identify, Bayesian, is known to derive from the speculation that his PhD thesis – and the software program that underpinned Autonomy – was based mostly on.

Witnesses say its aluminium mast broke in half in a storm, inflicting the ship to lose its stability and sink.

Dick Smith, a neighbour of Mr Lynch, informed the BBC he was “reeling from the shock of the information”.

“He was so approachable and an easy particular person to speak to with a pleasant sense of humour,” he mentioned.

“You would possibly assume with all that cash he could be tough to speak to, however in actual fact he was an easy particular person to speak to.”

Born on 16 June 1965, Mr Lynch was the son of a nurse and a fireman, and was raised close to Chelmsford in Essex.

His first laptop was a BBC Micro, and he wrote fondly of the way it formed his ardour for programming in a 2011 BBC article celebrating 30 years of the gadget.

Whereas at college his “first foray into commercialisation of know-how” got here when designing a digital sampler that would pattern music, then promoting the designs, based on a 2017 interview.

He continued the pastime whereas learning Pure Sciences on the College of Cambridge – the place he mentioned he irritated his school by getting “solder within the carpets” of his room.

Whereas at Cambridge he earned a PhD in mathematical computing, and later undertook a analysis fellowship.

In 1991, Mr Lynch helped set up Cambridge Neurodynamics – a agency which specialised in utilizing computer-based detection and recognition of fingerprints.

His tech agency Autonomy was created 5 years later, utilizing a statistical technique often known as “Bayesian inference” on the core of its software program.

The corporate’s fast-paced progress and success all through the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s noticed Mr Lynch earn a lot of awards and accolades.

In 2006 he was awarded an OBE in recognition of his service to UK enterprise.

He served on the board of the BBC as a non-executive director, and in 2011 was appointed to the federal government’s council for science and know-how – advising then-Prime Minister David Cameron on the dangers and potentialities of AI growth.

Autonomy, and later its software program Aurasma, was the front-of-shirt sponsor of Premier League crew Tottenham Hotspur from 2010-2013.

After Autonomy’s sale to HP in 2011 – from which Mr Lynch is believed to have earned £500m – he went on to determine tech funding agency Invoke Capital.

The enterprise capital fund invested within the creation of British cyber safety firm Darktrace in 2013.

Mr Lynch, who was a shareholder within the agency, held a seat on its board till earlier this 12 months.

“This was the start of a brand new life for Mike,” former cupboard minister Lord Deben informed Instances Radio.

“He is made such a contribution to Britain, his firms have put Britain within the forefront, and he was going to do it once more,” mentioned Lord Deben, who’s the previous Conservative MP John Gummer.