Mike Lynch reported missing after superyacht sinks off Sicily

LONDON — British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch is missing after the sinking of a superyacht off the coast of Sicily, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC.

The sources, who preferred not to be named due to the sensitivity of the situation, said that Angela Bacares, Lynch’s wife, was confirmed as having been rescued.

The superyacht, called the Bayesian, capsized at around 5 a.m. local time while anchored off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village located in the province of Palermo in Italy, according to various media reports.

The vessel was reportedly struck by an unexpectedly violent storm.

At least one man has died and six others were reported missing, while 15 people were rescued including a 1-year-old baby, NBC News reported, citing local officials.

The yacht “suddenly sank” most likely “due to the terrible weather conditions,” the City Council of Bagheria said, according to NBC.

Lynch, 59, is the founder of enterprise software firm Autonomy. He became the target of a protracted legal battle with Hewlett Packard after the U.S. tech giant accused him of inflating Autonomy’s value in an $11 billion sale.

HP took an $8.8 billion write-down on the value of Autonomy within a year of buying it.

Lynch was extradited from Britain to the U.S. last year to stand trial over the HP allegations. In June, he was acquitted of fraud charges following the trial, which lasted for three months.

Lynch was born in Ilford, a large town in East London, in 1965 and grew up near Chelmsford in the English county of Essex. He attended the University of Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, focusing on areas including electronics, mathematics and biology.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Lynch completed a Ph.D. in signals processing and communications.

Toward the end of the 1980s, Lynch founded a firm called Lynett Systems Ltd. which produced designs and audio products for the music industry.

A few years later, in the early 1990s, he founded a fingerprint recognition business called Cambridge Neurodynamics, which counted the South Yorkshire Police among its customers.

But his big break came in 1996 with Autonomy, which he co-founded with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt as a spinoff from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The company scaled into one of Britain’s biggest tech firms.

Lynch held a lot of influence in the U.K. technology sphere at the height of his success, having once been dubbed Britain’s Bill Gates by the media.

He co-founded Invoke Capital, a venture capital firm focused on backing European tech startups, in 2012.

In his role as a venture capitalist, Lynch was closely involved in helping British cybersecurity firm Darktrace and legal software startup Luminance get off the ground, backing both firms with sizable sums.

Lynch was previously on the board of U.K. broadcaster BBC. He also once served as an advisor to the British government on the Council for Science and Technology.