Mike Lynch, the software millionaire who went missing after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily, is one of the few examples of a British entrepreneur who founded a global technology company.

This fact has led to him being referred to as Britain’s Bill Gates, but in reality his story is very different from that of the Microsoft founder.

Less than three months ago, the 59-year-old was acquitted of 15 counts of fraud. In the US, he had been charged in connection with the takeover of his company Autonomy by the Silicon Valley giant Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for $11.1 billion. He had feared that this case would end with him dying in prison due to a lung disease.

“I have a number of medical problems that would have made my survival very difficult,” Lynch told the Sunday Times last month. “If that had gone wrong, it would have been the end of my life as I know it in every way.”

Lynch was born in Ireland and grew up near Chelmsford in Essex, where his mother was a nurse and his father was a fireman.

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

After launching several early technology start-ups – including one specializing in automatic license plate, fingerprint and facial recognition software for police – he founded Autonomy in 1996.

The software was used by companies to analyze huge amounts of data and owed its effectiveness in part to Bayesian inference, a statistical theory developed in the 18th century by the statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes.

The superyacht that sank off Sicily during a violent storm in the early hours of Monday morning has been named Bayesian.

Autonomy was a commercial success almost from the start. The company went public in Brussels in 1998. Its rapid growth and the dot-com boom led to a move to the London Stock Exchange, where Autonomy was included in the FTSE 100 of the largest British companies.

Lynch’s achievements led to him becoming a scientific adviser to David Cameron when he was Prime Minister and a non-executive director of the BBC. He was also awarded an OBE (Ministry of Defence) in 2006 for services to business.

Although Autonomy made such a big impression on HP that the company paid more than $11 billion for it in 2011, it took just a year for the US computer giant to write down the acquisition by $8.8 billion because it had discovered “serious accounting irregularities” at the British company.

Lynch has been effectively busy defending his reputation ever since – The claims are still having an impact, although the entrepreneur always denies the allegations.

Autonomy’s former finance director, Sushovan Hussain, was sentenced to five years in prison in the US after being convicted of fraud in 2018 in connection with the HP deal.

In 2022, Lynch lost a civil fraud case brought by HP in the UK, arguing that the businessman had exercised control over Hussain and that it was inconceivable that the Autonomy founder had not known about the alleged fraudulent practices in his company.

Justice Hildyard, the High Court judge in the case, was due to rule on HP’s $4 billion damages claim. He had said the amount he would award would be much lower. Lynch had said he intended to appeal the ruling.

Lynch was said to have put his own personal touch on the companies he ran and indulged his love of James Bond. Conference rooms were reportedly named after Bond enemies such as Dr. No and Goldfinger, and Autonomy even had a piranha tank in the atrium, a nod to the 007 film You Only Live Twice.

This professional portrait of Lynch contradicts what is known about him personally: He is married, has two children, and reportedly spent his free time building model trains and breeding koi carp.

Since his acquittal in the US, he has said he wants to address the imbalance he sees in the extradition agreement between Britain and the US. “It must be wrong that a US prosecutor has more power over a British citizen living in England than the British police,” he said.

He and his wife Angela Bacares, who was reportedly rescued from Bayesian captivity, have a fortune of £500 million, according to this year’s Sunday Times richest list.