Who is Mike Lynch, the UK tech boss missing in superyacht sinking? | Autonomy

Mike Lynch, the software millionaire missing after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily, is one of the few examples of a UK entrepreneur who has created a global technology company.

That fact has 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 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”, 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.”

Born in Ireland, Lynch was raised near Chelmsford in Essex, where his mother was a nurse and his father a firefighter.

He studied physics, mathematics and biochemistry at Cambridge University, eventually…