Autonomy
More info
- Creator
- Mike Lynch, Richard Gaunt
- Released
- 1996–2011
- Type
- Software company (search and information analytics)
- Successor
- Hewlett-Packard
British search company whose 2011 sale to HP became one of tech's most expensive mistakes and a decade-long courtroom saga.
Mike Lynch and Richard Gaunt founded Autonomy in Cambridge in 1996. Its IDOL platform used Bayesian statistics and pattern matching to search unstructured text, audio and video, well before machine learning was a boardroom phrase. Customers were banks, law firms and intelligence agencies with more data than anyone had time to read.
HP paid $11.1 billion in 2011 and a year later wrote down $8.8 billion, alleging the books had been inflated. A UK court sided with HP in 2022; in the US, Lynch was acquitted of criminal charges in June 2024 and died two months later when his yacht, aptly named Bayesian, sank off Sicily. The technology ended up, via Micro Focus, at OpenText.