It didn’t take Mike Lynch long to get back in the saddle. The former Autonomy boss, who left HP in May this year, is set to launch a UK-based technology investment fund.
According to a report in Bloomberg, the fund will be based in London but will look for investments across the world. He will be calling on other Autonomy executives for guidance, the report said.
Lynch certainly has plenty of cash to spare. It is thought he owned around 8% of Autonomy when it was bought by HP in August 2011 for $10bn, netting him an estimated $800m. He left in May this year following Autonomy’s poor performance the previous quarter. HP said Lynch and Autonomy were struggling to adapt to HP’s ways and were therefore failing to bring in the big deals.
However, as CBR revealed, Lynch’s departure was just one of many following the controversial acquisition. A number of other executives also left before and after Lynch.
Little is known about the new fund but with Lynch and the expertise of other Autonomy executives it is a safe bet that information management will feature strongly, probably focusing on Big Data and the management and analysis issues that surround it.
He has already made one investment since leaving Autonomy, pumping money into Featurespace, a start-up which analyses customer behaviour to spot early warning signs of identity fraud.
According to BusinessWeekly, Lynch is also looking into potentially buying back Aurasma, Autonomy’s artificial reality technology that is also now of course part of HP.
