Issue The report's forecasts rest on the publisher's own private-market scores

Summary

CB Insights builds every trend in its 2026 outlook on data it collects and scores itself. The signals combine company fundamentals with market behaviour to point at where innovation, capital and customer momentum are heading. The best known of these measures is the Mosaic score, a private company health rating out of 1,000. The publisher claims this score identified future unicorns 4.7 times more often than the venture firms it labels smart money. Other in-house measures cover commercial maturity, hiring momentum, exit probability and business relationships across more than 1,500 technology markets. Readers should therefore treat the forecasts as outputs of a commercial data product rather than of an independently audited evidence base.