This chart plots every pure-play CDR company in the Directory as a single dot. The horizontal axis is the company’s founding year (estimated from its primary domain registration), the vertical axis is its current headcount on a log scale, and the colour codes the company’s pathway. The shaded blue background traces overall company density — darker patches mark where the crowd of pure-plays sits.
The value here is shape, not ranking. A bar chart would tell you how many companies exist in each pathway; this view tells you the entire industry’s growth contour at one glance — when did the wave of small startups hit, where are the rare big older operators, what cluster sits on the floor of “still under five people”. Outlier dots near the top of the chart are the names everyone already knows; the dense low band is where most of the industry actually lives.
Read it as a structural snapshot, not a momentum signal. Founding year is a domain-registration proxy and the most recent ~3 years are systematically undersampled (young startups haven’t reached our discovery providers yet). Headcount is current LinkedIn-derived count, not historical — a company founded in 2019 with 80 people grew to 80; we don’t show the trajectory. The dots are static positions, not arrows.
What the chart shows today
570 pure-play CDR suppliers employ 9,498 people total, which works out to under 17 FTEs per company on average. The dot cloud is overwhelmingly bunched in the bottom-right corner: founded post-2020, headcount in single or low double digits, with Biochar (377 firms) doing most of the crowding. Climeworks sits alone up top as the lone four-digit outlier, and only a thin tail of DAC and BECCS dots breaks above the 100-FTE line. The so-what: the industry’s hiring curve is a wall of tiny startups born in the last four years, not a maturing sector with a deep bench, so any near-term delivery capacity is concentrated in maybe a dozen names.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.