The passing of Mike Lynch, the U.K. tech entrepreneur who perished last weekend when his luxury yacht abruptly sank in the Mediterranean, is unlikely to impact the sale of cybersecurity firm Darktrace, of which he and his wife own a significant share.
Thoma Bravo, a software-focused private equity firm, had agreed to buy Darktrace in April for $5.3 billion, and Darktrace shareholders voted to approve the sale in June. The deal still needs regulatory approval, but Thoma Bravo is expected to complete the acquisition by the end of 2024, a person familiar with the transaction said.
“If the shares have already been voted, there is no obvious mechanism or need for further approval or action to be taken by any shareholders, including the Lynch family or estate,” an attorney who advises on M&A transactions told Fortune.
The sale has been back in the spotlight in the wake of the yacht tragedy, which also took the life of Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter as well as of a prominent banker and lawyer. The deaths came the same week that Lynch’s co-defendant in a related fraud case was fatally run over by a car. The fraud case involved Autonomy, a software firm that Lynch founded and sold to U.S. tech giant HP, which accused him of using accounting improprieties to inflate the company's value.
Lynch’s connection to Darktrace is through his venture capital firm Invoke Capital. In 2013, a team of Cambridge mathematicians, including current CEO Poppy Gustafsson, along with business people and intelligence experts, founded the startup that relies on A.I. to combat cyberthreats. The U.K.-based Darktrace raised $230.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Invoke was an early investor of Darktrace.
Darktrace went public in 2021, during the height of the IPO boom. But rather than listing in the U.S., Darktrace opened for trading on the London Stock Exchange. Invoke Capital was said to be Darktrace’s largest investor at the time, owning 39.5% of the company, the Guardian reported. Within months of the IPO, Darktrace’s valuation soared to nearly 7 billion pounds ($9.2 billion).
In 2022, Thoma Bravo made its first attempt to buy Darktrace, but walked away from negotiations when the two sides couldn’t agree on terms. The PE firm returned this year, clinching a deal for Darktrace in April. By this time, Lynch’s stake in Darktrace had fallen. The entrepreneur and his wife, Angela Bacares, owned roughly 7% of Darktrace, the person said. The couple's stake then dropped further, to a little more than 3% by mid-August, according to a different person familiar with Darktrace.
Lynch and his wife were aboard a yacht named Bayesian after the Bayesian inference, a statistical model that formed the foundations of his company Autonomy. The boat sank off the coast of Sicily earlier this week and Lynch was pronounced dead Thursday, Aug. 22, while his wife survived. Lynch hasn’t been affiliated with Darktrace for some time. When he passed, he was not an executive of Darktrace but a shareholder.
Lynch’s influence on the U.K. tech scene was enormous and he was hailed as the “British Bill Gates,” although he was better known for his legal problems. A Cambridge-educated mathematician, he developed software that could extract useful information from unstructured sources including phone calls, emails, and video.
This software was at the core of Autonomy, which HP purchased for $11 billion in 2011. But the next year, HP was forced to write down $8.8 billion of Autonomy’s value, making it one of the worst deals in history.
HP, along with U.S. prosecutors, alleged that Lynch and Autonomy’s former finance chief used accounting tricks to inflate the company’s revenue ahead of the 2011 sale, Fortune reported. In August, a federal court in San Francisco acquitted Lynch of criminal fraud charges.
Lynch’s late co-defendant in the fraud trial, Stephen Chamberlain, served as Autonomy’s former vice president of finance. Both men were acquitted in a U.S. criminal trial, but civil lawsuits remain ongoing. Chamberlain also worked for Darktrace; he joined in 2016 as CFO and was named COO in September 2020. He went on administrative leave in June 2023, his LinkedIn said.
