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
569 pure-play dots are on the board right now, and together they employ just 9,527 people - a median well under the 10-tick on the log scale. Biochar remains by far the widest column, but its violin is bottom-heavy: the bulk of the shape sits between the 1 and 5 marks, so a red dot there usually means a one-person shop going quiet rather than a company failing. The pattern to watch is DAC, where the distribution stretches visibly further up the size axis toward 50 and beyond, meaning any dulling colours in that column represent real payroll and real hardware at risk. Practical takeaway: read the red dots against the violin behind them, because a stale 3-person biochar startup and a stale 40-person DAC firm are very different signals about the sector’s health.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.