Materials Modelling and Informatics Software Market

Materials play a pivotal role in a multitude of challenges facing our planet and societies, including safety and sustainability, resilience of supplies and manufacturing as well as ever increasing demands on their properties and functions. Across all sectors, advances in materials are required to address issues, such as sustainability, resourcing, recycling, safety, and numerous structural and functional performance criteria. The complexity of requirements, huge potential design space and required shortened development cycles of materials cannot be addressed by traditional research and development approaches. In response, methodologies, like model-based design and data-based methods that include machine learning and AI are being more widely deployed and integrated. The markets in pertinent technologies such as materials modelling have seen significant merger and acquisition activities as large product lifecycle management and engineering software providers acquire a range of ‘niche’ players in specific sectors of materials modelling and informatics. At the same time, due to the rapid development of data and modelling related technologies, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, semantic technologies, and quantum computing, the rate of new ventures entering the field remains high.

In this study, we update our 2020 study in materials modelling to include a total of 98 software providers. Furthermore, we extend the scope to include the field of materials informatics, including its sub-sectors of data content, data and information management, and materials modelling solutions based on data-based models, machine learning and artificial intelligence. In total, we include 38 companies in this section.

Finally, we introduce the nascent market in quantum-computing solutions for computational chemistry, with nine companies included. Providers are largely in the development phase, but applications are emerging.