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Morning Report: The Information recently published . Here’s some takeaways.

We’ve put out scribbled summaries of Uber’s financial performance here at Crunchbase News, but The Information put out a set of “adjusted” numbers from the ridehailing聽company that are than anything we’ve compiled.

It’s known that Uber is deeply unprofitable. How unprofitable, in fact, is almost shocking. The firm’s Q3 loss, for example, led us to describe its performance that quarter as a “red ink spill.” But, before this week, the breakdown of its continuing costs wasn’t clear.

Enter The Information’s chart. Here’s what stood out to us amidst the metrics that were noted as “[n]on-GAAP figures unless otherwise noted:”

• Uber spends over $400 million a quarter (trailing two quarters) on “rider promotions,” according聽to the report. That means that its topline growth is more sugar-fueled than I would have expected on demand side of the equation.
• Uber spends nearly $400 million a quarter (trailing three quarters) on “driver bonuses,” the report notes.

Pausing, we wrote before that we “suspect[ed] that Uber鈥檚 promotions to drivers (x number of rides in Y days to get bonus Z dollars) are contra-revenue.” The math in The Information’s聽reporting work out that way, with “net revenue” coming聽after promotions, bonuses, taxes, and fees.

• Uber’s net margins聽after all those costs aren’t great. That’s because Uber spends far, far more on insurance than I would have guessed. The firm’s $9.7 billion in Q3’17 gross revenue (ride value) led to $1.99 billion in net revenue. From that, $965 million went to insurance. That’s about half.
• That left Uber with a gross profit of just over $1 billion ($1.025 billion) to fund the rest of its business.
• From that, Uber had operating聽costs of $1.759 billion, leading to a sharp loss.

Make those figures GAAP across the board, and they presumably get worse. There’s a lot of good in Uber’s numbers from a growth perspective. But it’s a tough ball to unravel when you check out the ways that Uber’s costs have grown.

From The聽:

Dropbox said to file for long-awaited IPO

• 聽has reportedly submitted a confidential filing to go public.The news has sparked a guessing game over how markets will value the file sharing and storage company, which had a $10 billion valuation in its last private funding round and takes in over $1 billion in annual revenue.

Tallying the Year in ICOs

• Now that 2017 has come to a close, Crunchbase News takes a look at just how much initial coin offerings (ICOs) have grown over the past year. We found that an estimated $4.9 billion was raised through ICOs in 2017, even as investment by traditional VCs in blockchain startups fell year-over-year.

• Famed tech incubator聽聽is launching a new program called YC Bio that will focus on early-stage life science companies. The first area of focus will be lifespan and age-related disease.

• , an online platform for buying and selling luxury watches, has raised $34 million from Endeit Capital and Tengelmann Ventures, TechCrunch reports. The five-year-old Swiss startup is anticipating $130 million in transaction volume this year.