British entrepreneur of Irish parentage had a reputation for toughness and a liking for James Bond, which stretched to a tank of piranha fish in his office
, who has died aged 59 in the wreck of his yacht, was sometimes described as “Britain’s Bill Gates”. It was a huge exaggeration, but Lynch could claim two parallels with Gates: he developed world-leading technology and, unlike so many UK scientists, he learned how to turn it into commercial success.
But Autonomy’s software, enabling computers to identify and match themes and ideas, and sort mammoth amounts of data, was licensed to more than 500 customers, including the US State Department and the BBC. It was listed on Nasdaq in 1998 and on the FTSE 100 in November 2000, although its value of £5.1 billion would be halved within a few months in the collapse of the technology boom and accusations of over-promotion. In 2005 it bought a big US rival, Verity, for $500 million.
Born in Ilford, East London, to Michael, a firefighter whose family were from Cork, and Tipperary-born Dolores, a nurse, and brought up in Chelmsford, Lynch won a scholarship to the independent Bancroft’s school in Woodford Green, before taking a natural sciences degree at Cambridge, where his PhD in artificial neural networks, a form of machine learning, has been widely studied since.
The pinnacle of his success appeared to come in October 2011 when Autonomy was purchased by Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion and Lynch made an estimated $800 million. Shortly afterwards he established a new company, Invoke Capital, for investment in tech companies, and he and his wife, Angela Bacares, whom he had married in 2001, invested about £200 million in Darktrace, a cybersecurity company.
Meanwhile the US authorities sought Lynch’s extradition on criminal charges of conspiracy and fraud. In spite of representations by senior politicians and accusations that the US authorities were attempting to exercise “extraterritorial jurisdiction”, a district judge ruled in favour of extradition. Lynch declared that he wanted to get back to what he loved doing – innovating. But he had little opportunity to do so. He soon embarked on a voyage to celebrate his acquittal, with family, colleagues and business associates. It ended with the sinking of his yacht, Bayesian – named after the 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, whose work on probability had informed much of his thinking – in a violent storm off the coast of Sicily.
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