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

46 of the 246 biochar companies on this chart are flagged likely dead and another 10 are suspect, so 56 dots, roughly 23 percent of the column, sit in the two warning tiers. DAC runs close behind at 20 of 92 (14 likely dead, 6 suspect), while afforestation has zero in either tier across its 38 companies and the highest median headcount of any column at 35 employees. Across all 527 plotted companies, 76 are likely dead and 20 suspect, and biochar plus DAC account for 76 of those 96 red and orange dots. What these counts cannot tell you is where in each column the warning dots land, and that is the point of the violin: biochar’s median company has 7 employees, so if its 46 likely-dead dots cluster below that line the churn is mostly noise, and if they climb toward the 15 biochar firms with 100 or more employees it is real fragility.

Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.