Drug Discovery Informatics Market Projected to Reach $7.74 Billion by 2030 as AI Agents Need Biological Context

AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 06, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Equity Insider News Commentary - The global market for artificial intelligence in drug discovery is projected to grow from $5.09 billion in 2026 to $17.56 billion by 2031, a compound annual growth rate of 28.1%, according to MarketsandMarkets. As that spending moves from pilots into discovery workflows, the enterprise software industry has converged on a new layer between an organization’s data and the AI agents that act on it, variously called an ontology, a semantic layer or a context layer. The open question for life sciences is whether a layer built to describe a business can also describe biology. Active Companies from around the markets with current developments this week include: MindWalk Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: HYFT), Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: PLTR), Snowflake Inc. (NYSE: SNOW), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), Veeva Systems Inc. (NYSE: VEEV).

A separate forecast from Research and Markets sizes the narrower drug discovery informatics segment at $4.06 billion in 2025, rising to $7.74 billion by 2030, a 13.7% compound annual growth rate, and lists AI-driven research platforms, cloud adoption and big-data integration among the main drivers. Both forecasts point the same way: the money is moving toward software that can organize scientific data well enough for machines to reason over it.

That is why the ontology layer has become the most contested real estate in enterprise AI. Palantir has built its commercial business around its Ontology. Databricks, which remains privately held, said in June that its new Unity Catalog glossary and business domains feed what it calls the Genie Ontology, “a continuously learned enterprise context layer.” At its FabCon conference in Barcelona at the end of September, Microsoft introduced an agentic experience in Fabric IQ for creating ontologies from semantic models and OneLake data, describing Fabric IQ as giving “people and agents a shared understanding of the business.”

Each of these layers is built to model the entities of an enterprise: customers, orders, assets, sites. In drug discovery, the entity that matters most is a molecule, and what matters about it is what it does. That gap is the argument one Nasdaq-listed Bio-Native AI company is now making in public.

MindWalk Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: HYFT) Outlines Why Life Sciences Needs a Biological Context Layer of Its Own

Enterprise ontology layers describe the organization, but cannot encode what a protein does or which regions of an antibody biology will tolerate.

ReefIQ™, powered by HYFT® Technology, enriches a customer’s discovery data at ingestion against a biological representation of 660 million patterns and 25 billion relationships.

Customer programs, including those that failed, become governed, queryable biological context for the programs that follow. Model-agnostic design positions ReefIQ as complementary to the enterprise data platforms pharma already owns.

LensAI™ is in contracted, recurring arrangements with life sciences customers today

MindWalk Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: HYFT), a Bio-Native AI company, has outlined why the ontology layer now being built across enterprise AI does not reach biological function, and why life sciences requires a biological context layer of its own. The Company says ReefIQ, its biological context layer for life sciences, supplies what a horizontal ontology cannot: a governed, model-agnostic representation of what biology does, present on day one, enriching a customer’s own discovery data as it lands, and compounding the customer’s own intellectual property with every program run on it.

“The enterprise has discovered that an agent without an ontology guesses, and a guessing agent is a liability. That is exactly right, and it is exactly half of pharma’s problem,” said Dr. Jennifer Bath, President and Chief Executive Officer of MindWalk. “An enterprise ontology tells an agent what a purchase order, a patient or a clinical site is. In our view it cannot tell an agent what a protein does, which regions of an antibody biology will tolerate, or why a program that failed three years ago matters to the one running today.”

MindWalk’s case is that in an enterprise ontology, a protein sequence is a string in a property and a structure is a file. Nothing in the layer knows that two sequences with no surface similarity perform the same function. The Company argues that this knowledge is not in the enterprise’s data to be modeled; it is in biology and has to be brought to the data. In its view, biomedical literature networks and vocabulary services stop at the identifier of the molecule, lab informatics systems register molecules and assays without encoding function, and protein foundation models carry learned representations of function but are sold as models rather than as a governed layer that any model or agent can reason over.

ReefIQ is designed to occupy that gap. HYFT® Technology encodes biology as function-aware pattern-objects spanning sequence and structural biology, refined over 20 years of curation into a continuously evolving biological representation of 660 million patterns and 25 billion relationships. When a customer’s discovery data lands in ReefIQ, sequences, structures, assays, omics and program history are enriched at ingestion and become governed, queryable biological context. LensAI, MindWalk’s reasoning and application layer, and any model or agent a customer chooses to run, reason over that same context inside the customer’s own workflow, governance and human review.

“The competitive question is no longer which model or agent you run; every model becomes commodity. The question is what the model or agent runs on, because that is where the value ends up,” Dr. Bath added. “In the enterprise, that is an ontology of the business. In biology, it has to be a representation of biology itself, built from what evolution preserved, and the customer’s own programs, including the ones that failed, have to keep compounding inside it.”

The Company does not position ReefIQ against the enterprise data estate. Horizontal ontology platforms, cloud data platforms and lab informatics systems hold operational and instrument data, and MindWalk says ReefIQ supplies the biological context those systems cannot generate. It expects the two layers to be deployed together as pharma moves agentic AI from pilots into discovery workflows. MindWalk traces its biology heritage to its founding in 1983.

MindWalk Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: HYFT) is a Bio-Native AI company building the BioIntelligence infrastructure that life sciences AI and agentic AI require, integrating AI, data and advanced wet lab capabilities into one connected discovery ecosystem. At its core is HYFT® Technology, a proprietary, function-aware representation of biology. Its HYFT fingerprints span sequence and structural biology and, refined over 20 years of curation, form a continuously evolving biological representation of 660 million patterns and 25 billion relationships. This representation is the architecture behind ReefIQ™, the biological context layer for life sciences, and LensAI™, the reasoning and application layer for target discovery, candidate diligence, portfolio decision support and agentic AI workflows. More information is available at www.mindwalkai.com.

There are several risks associated with the Company’s plans. Market acceptance and adoption of ReefIQ and LensAI by life sciences customers may be slower than anticipated, and larger, better-resourced data platform, ontology and semantic-layer vendors may extend their offerings into biological data. The expectation that horizontal and biological context layers will be deployed together may not be realized, and the Company must maintain and defend its competitive positioning and intellectual property, including pending trademark and patent applications. MindWalk is a small company relative to the platforms discussed in this article, and its share price may be volatile. Readers should review the risk factors in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 20-F and other filings on SEDAR+ and EDGAR, and the forward-looking statements in the Company’s news release.

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In other industry developments and happenings in the market this week include:

Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: PLTR), whose Ontology sits at the center of its Foundry and AIP platforms, reported second quarter 2026 revenue of $1.935 billion, up 93% year over year, with U.S. commercial revenue up 149% to $764 million and record U.S. commercial total contract value of $2.132 billion. The company raised its full-year revenue guidance to $8.150 billion to $8.158 billion and its U.S. commercial revenue guidance to more than $3.424 billion, at least 134% growth.

“Demand for AI sovereignty has now been unleashed. And Palantir is the only company that has demonstrated it can transform tokens into actual economic value,” said Alex Karp, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. At its AIPCon 11 event on September 10, customers including Cisco, Eaton, L3Harris, NVIDIA and the Federal Aviation Administration presented deployments built on Palantir’s Ontology, Foundry, AIP and Sovereign AI offerings.

Snowflake Inc. (NYSE: SNOW) reported second quarter fiscal 2027 product revenue of $1.49 billion, up 37% year over year, with remaining performance obligations of $9.00 billion, up 30%, and a net revenue retention rate of 126%. The number of customers with trailing 12-month product revenue above $1 million rose 27% to 828.

“The Agentic Enterprise runs on Snowflake, and we’re just getting started,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Chief Executive Officer. The company guided third quarter product revenue to $1.588 billion to $1.593 billion and full-year fiscal 2027 product revenue to $6.07 billion, 36% growth, and said it introduced more than 330 product capabilities in the first half of the fiscal year.

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) reported fiscal 2026 fourth quarter revenue of $90.0 billion, up 18%, with Microsoft Cloud revenue of $59.3 billion, up 27%, and Azure and other cloud services revenue up 43%. “This year, Azure revenue surpassed $100 billion for the first time, and Microsoft 365 Copilot reached over 30 million paid seats,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

At FabCon and SQLCon 2026 in Barcelona, Microsoft expanded Fabric IQ, which it describes as a shared intelligence layer across its data estate, with a new agentic experience for creating ontologies from semantic models, OneLake data and other context documents. Users can define rules in natural language and connect them to ontology entities, properties and relationships, making them part of the shared context that people and agents use.

Veeva Systems Inc. (NYSE: VEEV), the life sciences cloud software provider, reported fiscal 2027 second quarter total revenue of $928.0 million, up 18%, subscription revenue of $766.8 million, up 16%, and operating income of $275.0 million, up 40%. Vault CRM passed 180 customers, including five top 20 pharmas, and the company raised full-year revenue guidance to $3.682 billion to $3.687 billion.

“AI is opening up the next big chapter for Veeva and life sciences,” said Peter Gassner, Chief Executive Officer, pointing to the combination of deep industry applications, agents, data and consulting. Veeva said its Falcon agentic platform has five early adopters with go-lives planned for 2026, and that Vault AI added new standard agents and custom development tools during the quarter.

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References to Palantir Technologies Inc., Snowflake Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Veeva Systems Inc. and Databricks, Inc. are provided solely as market and sector context. Those companies are not peers, competitors, or financial comparables of MindWalk Holdings Corp., none of them is involved in this article, and their results, scale, valuations and product developments are not indicative of MindWalk Holdings Corp.’s prospects. MindWalk is substantially smaller than each of them. No partnership, affiliation, customer relationship, or endorsement is implied. Databricks is a privately held company and its securities are not publicly traded. Descriptions of other companies’ ontology, semantic-layer and data products are drawn from those companies’ own public statements, and MindWalk’s characterizations of the limitations of horizontal ontology layers are the Company’s own views. Market-size figures cited are third-party projections for the markets as a whole and do not represent revenue addressable by, or attributable to, any company named in this article.

Cautionary Note Regarding Company Statements. Statements in this article about the capabilities, design, differentiation and expected deployment of ReefIQ™, LensAI™ and HYFT® Technology are drawn from MindWalk Holdings Corp.’s own announcement and have not been independently verified by us. [REMOVED: this sentence disclaimed a no-competitor-matches-us superlative that appears nowhere in the article body. If that claim sits in MindWalk’s own release, it is a competitive superlative against unnamed competitors and needs Legal clearance before it is restated anywhere.] The Company’s expectation that horizontal and biological context layers will be deployed together is forward-looking and may not occur. Additional information is available in the Company’s Annual Report on Form 20-F and other filings on SEDAR+ (www.sedarplus.ca) and EDGAR (www.sec.gov).

Trademarks. HYFT® is a registered trademark of MindWalk Holdings Corp. ReefIQ™ and LensAI™ are trademarks of MindWalk Holdings Corp.; ReefIQ™ registration is pending. All other marks referenced in this article are the property of their respective owners.

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