Daylight Chemical Information Systems, Inc. was incorporated in 1987 and grew from the MedChem Project at Pomona College. The invention of the SMILES language, by Dave Weininger, first at the EPA in the early '80s and then Pomona, laid the groundwork for the creation of a new chemical information system. 

Daylight's mission has been to provide high performance chemical information processing tools to chemists. New software has been developed continually and the list of available and supported software continues to grow. Emphasis has been placed on the "Daylight Toolkit", a set of programming libraries comprising a "chemical information infrastructure", upon which custom applications can be built. The toolkit has been used both by Daylight developers to build supported applications, by other software developers in their commercially available applications, and by customers to build custom in-house applications.

Currently (v4.6), two platforms are supported: Sun (SunOS) and SGI (IRIX). Remote-toolkit clients are supported on MacOS and Windows.

Daylight has utilized state of the art computing technology in several areas to provide high performance and forward mobility in a rapidly changing computing world. Thor's hashing algorithm and Merlin's RAM-intensive design has provided high speed lookup and search capability since their introduction in 1986 and 1987, respectively. A client-server database system was introduced in 1990 to provide network database access, evolving beyond the mainframe model. The object-oriented programming toolkit was also released that year. Other new subsystems introduced in the '90s include Clustering, Rubicon, the Monomer (combinatorial chemistry) Toolkit, and the Reaction Toolkit. Parallel processing has been exploited to accelerate key tasks, including searching and clustering.

In February 1996, Web-based chemical information access was introduced with "DayCGI." This new chemical information system model is being expanded with other web technologies including Java, which promises increased portability and useability, delivering more chemical information services to more chemists, and advancing Daylight's mission. The first release of Daylight Java tools is 4.61 in 1998.

Daylight's corporate office is in Mission Viejo, California; the research office is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the European office is in Cambridge, England.