Mike Lynch (businessman)

Michael Richard Lynch (born 16 June 1965) is a British entrepreneur.

He is the co-founder of Autonomy Corporation and the founder of Invoke Capital.

Lynch additionally became a co-founder, alongside Invoke Capital, of cybersecurity company Darktrace.

He has also had various other roles, including those in an advisory capacity.

His entrepreneurship is associated with Silicon Fen.

Lynch is known for his work applying techniques from signal processing, machine learning and pattern recognition to unstructured information.

Lynch has been accused of fraudulently inflating the value of Autonomy before its sale to Hewlett-Packard, which has resulted in litigation and his extradition to the US.

Lynch was born in Ilford, Essex in 1965 and grew up near Chelmsford, Essex.

His mother was a nurse from Tipperary and his father a fireman from Cork.

In 1976, aged 11, he won a scholarship to Bancroft's School, Woodford.

From there he went to Christ's College, Cambridge to study Natural Sciences.

He combined mathematics, biological and physical sciences, taking the combination of advanced physics, mathematics and biochemistry in the IB Tripos.

For part II, he chose electrical sciences where he first met Peter Rayner, his mentor in the signal processing laboratory of the engineering department.

After graduating he went on to do a PhD in signal processing and communications research at the University of Cambridge, and then undertook a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition.

In the late 1980's, Lynch’s founded his first company, Lynett Systems Ltd. which designed electronic synthesizers.

The company produced designs and audio products for the music industry.

One of his inventions included a sampler for the Atari ST known as the Lynex.

In 1991 he set up Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialized in computer-based fingerprint recognition.

In 1991, Lynch was a co-founder of Neurascript, a company which focused on software that delivered the recognition, extraction, indexing, classification and data capture of information from business documents.

Neurascript was sold to Dicom Group PLC through a trade sale.

In 1996 Lynch co-founded Autonomy Corporation.

and he served Autonomy as CEO.

During this time Autonomy acquired Dremedia, Virage ($13m), Verity ($500m), Zantaz ($375m) and Interwoven ($606m).

In 2000, Autonomy Corporation was listed on Easdaq, Nasdaq and the London stock exchange.

Autonomy Corporation became a FTSE100 company by 6 December.

In 2004, using the technology developed at Autonomy Corporation, Lynch founded Blinkx, a company which focused on providing video search services in the consumer internet sector.

Blinkx went public on the London Stock Exchange (AIM) in May, 2007 with a valuation of $1Bn.

In 2008, Lynch invested in Featurespace, a company set up by Professor Bill Fitzgerald.

Featurespace originally focused on the development of software that detects anomalous transactions.

Shortly after, Featurespace converted from a consultancy into a technology company and began developing a new form of data analysis called “adaptive behavioural analytics”.

FeatureSpace expanded by 624% and employs 320 people across Cambridge, Singapore and Atlanta.

In October 2011 Autonomy was sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion.

In May 2012, HP fired Mike Lynch and later recorded a writedown of around $8.8 billion related to the acquisition due to "extensive accounting errors and misrepresentations" at Autonomy.

Lynch faced a civil case in the UK and charges in the US related to the allegations.

In February 2013, Lynch raised $1 billion through his Invoke Capital fund to invest in up and coming British technology companies.

In September 2013, Invoke Capital participated in the funding of American Swiss biotechnology company, Sophia Genetics, which provides genomic and radiomic analysis for hospitals.

In September 2013, Lynch announced Invoke had made its first investment, putting up to $20m into Darktrace (alongside Hoxton Ventures and Talis Capital) which uses the same Bayesian mathematics as Autonomy and describes itself as "the world's first behavioural cyber defence platform."

In 2014, Lynch assisted in raising $13.75M in Series B financing in a round led by his company Invoke Capital.

Other financiers included Swisscom and Endeavour Vision.

Following this investment, the company was ranked among the 50 smartest companies by the MIT Technology Review in 2017.