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 now sit on this scatter, together employing 13,571 people, and the density blob is unmistakably parked in the post-2020 / under-20-heads corner. Biochar throws off the most dots (377 companies) but the tall outliers belong elsewhere: DAC and Enabling Tech names founded a decade or more ago are the ones dragging the y-axis into the hundreds and low thousands. Afforestation adds a second cluster of older, mid-sized dots that predate the 2021-2023 founding wave the rest of the chart is built on. The so-what: industry headcount is not a smooth curve, it is a handful of aging DAC/forestry anchors plus a very young, very small long tail, so any “CDR is hiring” narrative is really a story about maybe 20 companies doing the hiring.
Chart refreshed from our CDR Company Directory. We publish a data-viz read like this twice a week.