Here are the 5 most likely U.S. IPO candidates for 2017

A new report offers some mild optimism for the 2017 IPO market after a 2016 that basically turned into a big, fat disappointment.

The 5th annual Tech IPO Pipeline Report from CB Insights released today tracks 369 private companies in the U.S. that seem to be on the road to a public offering of stock at some point. Within those numbers are some interesting trends to note.

First, there have been 14 tech IPOs year-to-date in 2016. That’s down from 19 in 2015, which already wasn’t such a hot number. CB Insights projects that number will go up in 2017, but we’ll see.

Next, the whole unicorn thing seems to be losing steam. CB Insights tracked 23 new unicorns in 2014 and 40 in 2015, based on valuations of rounds raised in those years. But there were only 12 new unicorns in 2016.

In part, that’s because the number of rounds over $100 million raised fell from 77 in 2015 to 41 in 2016. It seems that venture capitalists are growing tired of underwriting mega-startups and are looking for the exits. Which, again, could create pressure for more IPOs.

CB Insights uses a proprietary calculation called Mosaic to determine the strength and rank of privately held companies. Mosaic calculates a score using three broad data points: Momentum (based on signals from social media, news sentiment, mobile and web traffic/usage, hiring, customer, and partner signings); Market (overall health of a company’s industry based on things like hiring, funding, and exits); Money (money raised, burn rate, and quality of investors).

Using that Mosaic score, CB Insights says these are the 5 strongest IPO candidates:

For more on these companies, read our coverage here:

• Qualtrics: Survey software player Qualtrics tacks on $150M
• Blue Apron: Blue Apron is cooking up a $100M funding round on a $2B valuation
• Zuora: Zuora lands a massive $115M as the world goes “-as-a-service”
• Okta: Okta giving away identity cloud platform to nonprofits for free, up to 25 employees
• Pluralsight: Pluralsight snaps up HackHands to offer budding coders real-time support