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

569 pure-play suppliers are plotted here, and the cloud sits overwhelmingly in the bottom-right: small teams founded after 2020. Biochar dominates the dot count at 377 industry-wide, but on this chart those dots cluster tightly under 15 FTE, while the handful of pre-2015 DAC and BECCS founders drift up into the 50-500 range. Climeworks remains the lone outlier punching above that ceiling, which is why the density underlay barely registers anywhere north of it. The shape tells you the hiring base of pure-play CDR is roughly 9,500 people, but strip out a dozen older outliers and the median company is a sub-10-person shop that started during the voluntary-market run-up.

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