This violin plot sorts every pure-play CDR company in the Directory by its pathway (columns) and its headcount (vertical axis, log scale from 1 to 100+). Each dot is one company, coloured by its current liveliness tier — Active, Moderate, Suspect, or Likely Dead. The grey shape behind each column is the size distribution: where it bulges, that’s where most companies in that pathway sit.
The value here is comparative. A raw company list tells you who exists; this view tells you where the weight sits. Pathways with most dots stacked at the bottom are dominated by sub-10-employee firms — many small entrants, few that have grown. Pathways with dots reaching up the column have produced operators that scaled past the founder-and-a-few-engineers phase. Colour (not vertical position) is what tells you the health story: red dots high up the column mean a sizeable operator went quiet; red dots on the floor are the long tail churning as it always has.
Read it as a snapshot of signal strength, not a verdict on the science. “Likely Dead” means we have stopped seeing credible activity, not that the underlying method failed. Older pathways accumulate more suspect entries mechanically, so do not confuse age with weakness.
What the chart shows today
377 biochar companies dominate the directory, but on this chart their dots stack low: most cluster between 1 and 10 employees, with the violin bulging fat at the bottom and tapering fast above 50. DAC tells the opposite story - 125 entries, dots spread up the log axis with a real shoulder around 50-100 headcount, meaning fragility there sits on bigger payrolls. Enhanced Weathering and Biomass Burial (33 and 31 pure-plays) are almost entirely sub-10 dots, so a red tier in those columns is mostly hobby-scale noise. Across all 569 pure-plays sharing 9,527 employees, the average is 17 - which means any dot above 50 on this chart is doing real work, and that’s where the red ones actually matter.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.