Technology

A Long Legal War Over a $10 Billion Takeover Heads to a Close

The British court ruling on HPE’s accusations of fraud by Autonomy is expected by midyear.

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By Jonathan Browning

March 5, 2020 at 5:01 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the March 9, 2020 issue of businessweek.

Back when everyone still said “big data” instead of “machine learning,” the U.K.’s Autonomy Corp. considered itself an early leader in sorting and analyzing huge troves of information about online behavior, from video views to Facebook likes. Hewlett-Packard Co. thought so too and, in 2011, wrote a $10.3 billion check to buy it.

That was validation not only for Britain’s “Silicon Fen” but also for Mike Lynch, the University of Cambridge graduate with a Ph.D. in mathematical computing who founded Autonomy in 1996. After building it into the country’s second-biggest software company, he personally made $815 million from Autonomy’s sale. The adulation quickly turned to scandal, however, for both HP and Lynch.