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 CDR companies currently sit on this chart, and between them they employ just 9,525 people - an average of under 17 FTEs per company. The density underlay tells the story plainly: the crowd is packed into the bottom-right corner, young companies founded in the last five years that have barely started hiring, while genuine outliers like Climeworks float almost alone in the upper band. Biochar dominates the dot count, but its firms cluster tightly in that small-team zone rather than pulling the industry’s headcount upward. The practical read: this is still an industry of startups, not scale-ups, and total hiring capacity across all pure-plays is smaller than a single mid-sized manufacturing firm. Anyone modelling CDR deployment timelines should treat workforce, not just capital, as a binding constraint.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.