LYNCH
Michael

Michael Richard Lynch is a British technology entrepreneur, known as 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.

Following a degree, PhD and post-doctoral research at Cambridge University, he applied his research in machine learning to set up software companies and become a major figure in Silicon Fen. The sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 led to accusations of fraud and resulted in civil litigation in the UK and Lynch's extradition to the US, where he went on trial in March 2024.

Career

Lynch set up his first company in the late 1980s, while he was studying for his PhD. Lynett Systems Ltd was financed with a £2000 loan negotiated in a bar and produced designs and audio products for the music industry, including electronic synthesizers and a sampler for the Atari ST. In 1991 he founded Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialized in computer-based fingerprint recognition. There were three spin-offs from Cambridge Neurodynamics: Neurascript, which searched business documents based on character recognition and was bought by German Company Dicom in 2004; NCorp, which searched databases; and Autonomy which searched unstructured sources including phone calls, emails and videos.

Autonomy was founded in 1996 by Lynch, David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt. With Lynch as chief executive office (CEO), the search software company grew to become one of the UK's top 100 public companies, and a leading company in Silicon Fen. In October 2011 Autonomy was sold to Hewlett-Packard for more than $11 billion (£8.6 billion). The sale would eventually lead to civil and criminal cases against Lynch and Autonomy's chief financial officer (CFO) Sushovan Hussain.

After the sale of Autonomy, Lynch founded a venture capital firm, Invoke Capital. One of the first companies backed by Invoke Capital was cybersecurity firm Darktrace. Invoke Capital became the firm's biggest shareholder, with Lynch and his wife Angela Bacares being the second biggest, holding shares worth nearly £200 million. Many of the staff at Darktrace, including its CEO, had moved across from Autonomy and Lynch was a member of the board until 2018 and continued as a member of the advisory council until 2021, and a member its science and technology council until February 2023. As well as having to deal with questions about Lynch's involvement with the company, Darktrace has also had to counter scepticism about its technology which analysts had referred to as "snake oil". Other technologies backed by Invoke Capital include: Featurespace, which specialises in software to detect and prevant fraud and financial crime; legal technology firm Luminance, established in collaboration with Slaughter and May; and Sophia Genetics, a Swiss medical data company.

As a leading technology entrepreneur, Lynch held a number of positions on boards and committees. When he was charged with fraud in the United States he resigned from his role as a government advisor on the Council for Science and Technology and from Royal Society committees. He had previously been on the board of Cambridge Enterprise, Kew Gardens, the BBC and the British Library, Nesta and the Francis Crick Institute.