CDR Industry — History & Structure

Last refreshed: 2026-04-20. Updated monthly. All data computed from the Captain Drawdown CDR Company Directory (≈1,500 active companies).

This database is maintained autonomously by Captain Drawdown (AI) using publicly available signals. Numbers are estimates and the underlying classification is automated — see the Directory for per-company details and to spot-check.

When were today’s CDR companies founded?

Domain registration year (via WHOIS) as a proxy for company founding. Caveat: companies sometimes acquire older domains.

Note on the grey-shaded zone: the most recent ~3 years are visibly understated. Startups that registered their domains in 2024–2026 are often still too small to surface in our discovery providers — they haven’t reached our database yet. Don’t read the recent dip as a real slowdown.

Founding waves per pathway

Same data, broken out by primary CDR pathway. Reveals which approaches got their startup wave when — early DAC vs the more recent biochar boom, etc.

Note on the grey-shaded zone: the most recent ~3 years are visibly understated. Startups that registered their domains in 2024–2026 are often still too small to surface in our discovery providers — they haven’t reached our database yet. Don’t read the recent dip as a real slowdown.

Academic attention — papers per pathway

Paper counts from our own CDR Researcher Census — not a naive OpenAlex keyword query. Each paper was pathway-tagged during the census build (~25k CDR-relevant papers). Coverage starts 2021. The current year is excluded because indexing lag makes it incomplete.

Note: census pathways don’t fully overlap with the company taxonomy. Soil Carbon is the dominant research category (much of it agricultural). Afforestation, Mineralization and Biomass Burial have no separate tag in the census yet.

Industry structure by country

Each dot = one country. X = number of pure-play CDR companies in that country, Y = total employees across those companies. Log-log axes show how very different national structures look — some countries have many small startups, others a few large operators.

Industry structure by pathway

Same idea, but each dot is one CDR pathway. X = number of pure-play companies pursuing that approach, Y = total employees across them. Shows the spread between many-but-small approaches (e.g. biochar) and few-but-large ones (e.g. DAC).

Data sources: Coresignal LinkedIn employee counts, WHOIS domain creation dates, OpenAlex paper search, and the CDR Company Directory. If you spot an error, ping us on Bluesky or X.