Invoke's Mike Lynch: The software nerd plotting rise of the machines despite looming $5bn lawsuit

But he hasn’t let the lawsuit get him down. “The first time I saw him after all that happened, there was a group of people around so he was very relaxed. Then I saw him later that day and I asked him ‘are you really ok?’ And he was. He was just as laidback in private,” recalls Suranga Chandratillake of tech investor Balderton Capital.

Lynch’s one indulgence is his love of James Bond. The 007 fan has owned an Aston Martin DB5, as made famous by the spy and rooms at Autonomy’s home in Cambridge were all named after Bond villains. Here, at Invoke’s shiny, new office — it recently moved round the corner from Pall Mall — they are all named after fictional spies. We’re in Jack Bauer (of 24 fame).

Lynch says it was the idea of staff from Darktrace, the cyber-security company with which Invoke shares the London office and its most successful investment to date. Run by Nicole Eagan, who was Autonomy’s chief marketing officer, it raised another $75 million this summer which valued Darktrace at $850 million. Lynch says: “That’s a real valuation. It’s done well over $200 million in bookings now so it’s not one of these, sort of, PR valuations. It’s going to be a multi-billion business in the not-too-distant future.”

Darktrace has ambitions to float, though he claims the London market “isn’t very effective for technology businesses”. “There ought to be five software companies on the FTSE 100 and there aren’t. We’ve got to get the virtuous circle going,” Lynch says.

He sold out to HP because there was no poison pill in the UK. He has said that, with a 60% premium on the share price offered, there was no choice but to sell. “I’m not actually so worried about big companies being sold because what happened at Autonomy is all those people have gone off and started new, great businesses.”

The problem, he says, is when companies are sold for “a hundredth of the size” which is “massively damaging” for the UK. He also points out the original funding for research often comes from the taxpayer, who he says “should have some say in making sure the benefit comes back to the UK economy”.

Lynch, who sits on the Prime Minister’s Scientific Advisory Panel, donated £100,000 to the Remain campaign last year and is concerned about the impact Brexit might have on science.

“Allowing talented academics and scientists to work here ought not to get rolled up with the general debate on immigration,” he says.

Lynch, worth an estimated £470 million, was brought up in Essex before going to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, then did a signal processing and communications research PhD.

He also started building synthesisers in a venture that became audio equipment firm Lynett Systems (“I was desperate to be that guy who did the keyboards in Fame”). He’d go along with the designs to demo the gear with session musicians. “Musicians are great fun to be with but you do not want your daughter marrying one,” he says. “It was great fun but then I realised the problem with the music business is you do it for love, rather than money.”

He started using the tech he had designed for other things. In the early Nineties, he formed Cambridge Neurodynamics, which designed technology for fingerprint-matching machines, subsequently used by the police.

Apax wanted to invest, which proved one of the private equity firm’s best decisions. “I think they turned £1 million into £1 billion.” It spun out several companies including Autonomy, which went onto become a FTSE 100 heavyweight and which Lynch says “was ahead of its time”. He adds that if Léo Apotheker, HP’s chief executive who was fired shortly after the takeover, had stayed it could have been “an industry-changing deal”, but instead, “we were left there as the unwanted stepchild”.

At the start of the month, Micro Focus, one of only two software companies on the FTSE 100, completed its $8.8 billion deal for the software assets of HP Enterprise. Many saw it as Autonomy’s return to the UK but Lynch says it is “a little bit different”. “Before I left, Hewlett-Packard had lost most of the talent from the high-growth innovation side of Autonomy. Some of that’s here, some of it’s created other businesses.”

Certain industry insiders wonder why Lynch, after five years at Invoke, has invested in only 10 start-ups. He responds: “Always take a gun to a knife fight.” It’s a regular uttering at Invoke, meaning you shouldn’t invest in something unless you know you’ll win.

Only four of Invoke’s investments are public. The other three are Sophia Genetics, a Switzerland-based healthcare start-up which raised $30 million this month; Luminance, whose technology helps lawyers to comb through thousands of dense documents, and Neurence, the “big blue-sky one”.

He is interested in solving problems, rather than creating the next big social media site: “Kim Kardashian is a mystery to me.” He’s not a big Twitter or Instagram user. The married tech tycoon spends his spare time breeding rare animals at his home in Suffolk.

All of Invoke’s investments have one thing in common and hark back to his PhD: machine learning. It’s something Lynch is bullish about. “We’re starting to see things where machines are more accurate than humans,” he says, bringing up the speech recognition milestone again. “I think it is the equivalent of the next industrial revolution.” He reckons about three out of 10 jobs will be affected as other jobs are made elsewhere.

And what about killer machines concerns? “I’m much more worried about evil people with robots. If we get through [that] phase then we can worry about the evil robots phase.”

Just that small matter of a $5 billion court case to worry about first.