Michael Richard Lynch (16 June 1965 – 19 August 2024) was a British technology entrepreneur who co-founded Autonomy Corporation, Invoke Capital and Darktrace. He had various other roles, including in an advisory capacity.

Following an undergraduate degree, a PhD and postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge, Lynch applied his research in machine learning to set up software companies and become a major figure in Silicon Fen. He was described in the press as the British equivalent of the American businessman Bill Gates, with an estimated worth of £852 million in 2023.

The sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 led to accusations of fraud and resulted in civil litigation in the UK in 2019. The case was decided largely in favour of Hewlett-Packard. In 2023, Lynch was extradited to the United States to face criminal charges. He went on trial in San Francisco in March 2024 and in June was found not guilty on all counts.

Lynch was celebrating his acquittal with a cruise on his family's superyacht, Bayesian, when it sank in a storm off the coast of Sicily on 19 August 2024. Lynch, his daughter and five others died.

Lynch was born in Ilford, London Borough of Redbridge, on 16 June 1965 and grew up near Chelmsford in Essex. His mother was a nurse from County Tipperary and his father a firefighter from County Cork in Ireland.

Aged 11, he won a scholarship to study at Bancroft's School, a private school in Woodford, London. He was later the lead patron of the Bancroft's Foundation, which was established to provide means tested scholarships to able students regardless of family income. His first computer was a BBC Micro which he bought for £400, raising the money by doing odd jobs. From Bancroft's he went on to study the Natural Science Tripos at Christ's College at the University of Cambridge. After graduating he did postgraduate research in artificial neural networks and was awarded a PhD in 1990 for a thesis on signal processing, supervised by Peter Rayner. He subsequently undertook a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition.

Lynch set up his first company in the late 1980s, while he was studying for his PhD. Lynett Systems Ltd was financed with a £2,000 loan negotiated in a bar, and produced designs and audio products including synthesisers and a sampler for the Atari ST. In 1991, he founded Cambridge Neurodynamics, which specialised in computer-based fingerprint recognition. There were three corporate spin-offs from Cambridge Neurodynamics:

In 1996, Lynch founded Autonomy, a search software company, with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt. With Lynch as chief executive officer (CEO), Autonomy became one of the UK's top 100 public companies, and a leading company in Silicon Fen. Lynch was described in the press as the British equivalent of the American businessman Bill Gates. In October 2011, Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy for more than $11 billion (£8.6 billion). Lynch made an estimated $800 million from the sale.