Who is Mike Lynch, the tech boss of Irish descent missing in superyacht sinking?

Mike Lynch was born to Irish parents and raised near Chelmsford in Essex, where his mother worked as a nurse and his father was a firefighter. Picture: Yui Mok/PA Wire

Mike Lynch, the software millionaire missing after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily, is seen in Britain as one of the few examples of an entrepreneur to create a global technology company.

Mr Lynch was born in Ilford, Essex, and raised in nearby Chelmsford, where his mother was a nurse and his father a firefighter. His mother is originally from Tipperary while his father is a Cork native. 

Mr Lynch's success led to seemingly obligatory descriptions of him as “Britain’s Bill Gates” but, in truth, his story differs hugely from that of the Microsoft founder.

Less than three months ago, the 59-year-old was cleared of 15 counts of fraud he had faced in the US over the $11.1bn (€10bn) purchase of his company, Autonomy, by the Silicon Valley giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011, a case he feared would end with him dying in prison because of a lung condition.

“I have various medical things that would have made it very difficult to survive”, Mr Lynch told the Sunday Times last month. “If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.” 

Mr Lynch's mother was from Carrick an Suir in Tipperary and he spent summers there visiting relatives.

He once donated €15,000 to the Carrick Davins GAA club through an uncle, a local source said.

Local Fianna Fáil Councillor for Carrick an Suir Kieran Bourke said that the tragedy was “heartbreaking".

“It is a very sad occasion. After the trauma that he and his family have been put through with the courts over the last number of years and then to only have it finalized to a successful conclusion and then this tragedy to happen to him and his family. It is just heartbreaking and horrendous.”

Mr Lynch studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry at Cambridge University, eventually specialising in adaptive pattern recognition. His doctoral thesis is reportedly one of the most widely read pieces of research in the university library.

Autonomy

After launching a few early technology start-ups — including one that specialised in automatic number-plate, fingerprint and facial recognition software for the police — he created Autonomy in 1996.

Its software was used by companies to analyse huge caches of data and partly owed its efficacy to Bayesian inference, a statistical theory devised by the 18th-century statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes.

The superyacht that sank off Sicily during a violent storm in the early hours of Monday was called Bayesian.

Autonomy was an almost immediate business success. The company floated in Brussels in 1998, and rapid growth coupled with the dotcom boom would lead to a move to the London Stock Exchange, where Autonomy joined the FTSE 100 of top UK-listed companies.

However, while Mr Lynch’s creation impressed HP enough to pay more than $11bn for the company in 2011, it only took a year for the US computing giant to take an $8.8bn (€8bn) writedown on its acquisition, saying that it had discovered “serious accounting improprieties” at the UK company.

Mr Lynch had effectively been involved in defending his reputation ever since.

• The Guardian