DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that unsettled the industry with a cheap, capable model last year, has closed its first round of outside funding, raising roughly 50 billion yuan, about $7bn, in a deal whose structure is as notable as its size. The valuation lands between $52bn and $59bn, according to Reuters.
The unusual part is who is putting in the most. Founder Liang Wenfeng is committing 20 billion yuan of his own money, a controlling share of the raise, which keeps him firmly in charge of a company that until this year had taken no external venture capital at all.
DeepSeek had been funded entirely from the balance sheet of High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund Liang also founded, and the new round is less an opening of the doors than a carefully managed crack.
The largest outside backers are names that carry weight in China’s tech and industrial economy. Tencent is weighing roughly 10 billion yuan and the battery giant CATL around 5 billion yuan, which would place two of the country’s most significant companies on the cap table while leaving the founder’s stake dominant.
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The presence of CATL, a battery maker rather than a software firm, hints at the breadth of Chinese corporate interest in backing a national AI champion.
The structure tells you something about DeepSeek’s priorities. By taking the controlling share himself, Liang accepts the cost of outside capital, dilution, expectations, scrutiny, without ceding the control that founders raising at this scale usually give up.
For a lab that has positioned itself around an open, research-first identity and declared artificial general intelligence as its goal, keeping strategic independence is part of the proposition.
It also sits inside a wider story about Beijing’s relationship with the company. DeepSeek has become something of a state-favoured project, the subject of travel curbs on its talent and of national pride in its technical wins, and a funding round anchored by the founder and a roster of major domestic firms reads as much as a strategic statement as a financial one.
The valuation itself is a leap for a company that, a year and a half ago, was little known outside specialist circles. DeepSeek vaulted into global attention with a model that matched far costlier Western systems at a fraction of the training spend, a result that briefly rattled US technology stocks and reframed assumptions about how much compute a frontier model truly requires.
A valuation approaching $59bn is the market putting a price on that disruption.
The figures, as reported, remain attributed to people familiar with the deal rather than to DeepSeek, and the precise allocations could shift. What is settled is the shape: a $7bn-plus raise at a valuation up to $59bn, with the man who built the company writing the largest cheque in it.
The iPhone Shortcuts app reminds me of Minecraft. It might be relatively easy to jump into, but it offers nearly limitless potential, allowing you to build anything you want. The same holds true for the Shortcuts app, and that endless possibilities are what many iPhone users might find intimidating. But you don’t have to.
If you are new to iPhone shortcuts, think of them as little automated helpers. You can build them yourself or find ones that others have built and use them. And that’s the beauty of shortcuts. If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you can find shortcuts others have created and tailor them to your needs.
With that said, let’s check out my favorite shortcuts. These are not the best shortcuts on everyone’s list, but they are the ones I use daily to get things done faster and more efficiently.
App settings: stop digging through the settings app
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes hunting for an app’s permissions inside the Settings app knows how frustrating it can be. You have to open the Settings app, scroll all the way down, open the Apps section, scroll again to find your app, and only then can you enter its settings.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
This shortcut fixes that completely. It uses the Get Current App and Open URLs actions in the Shortcuts app to detect which app you are currently in and jump straight to its settings page. Once you set it up and add it to your Control Center, all you have to do is open the app, swipe down from the top, and tap the shortcut.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
It will automatically open the current app’s settings. It is genuinely one of the most practical shortcuts I have ever created, and you can download it using the link below.
Apple Frames 4: make your screenshots look professional
If you ever share screenshots on social media, a blog post, or a presentation, this shortcut is for you. Apple Frames 4 is a free shortcut by Federico Viticci of MacStories, which can wrap your screenshots in a proper device frame.
The latest version is noticeably faster, supports all recent Apple devices, and even lets you choose frame colors and scale the images proportionally. What I love most about this shortcut is that it can take multiple screenshots as input and combine them in one image.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
All the images in this article have been created using the same shortcut. If you also take screenshots regularly, I can highly recommend this shortcut. I would also recommend you check out my favorite screenshot utility for Mac. It offers all the missing features of Mac’s built-in screenshot tool and then some.
Scan document: your pocket scanner is already in your hand
You don’t need a third-party app to scan documents on an iPhone. You don’t even need to open the Notes or Files app the usual way. With this shortcut, you can open the document scanner instantly and scan and save papers without any extra steps.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
I have it in my Home Screen and use it whenever I need to quickly scan a receipt, a letter, or any paper document. It’s one of those shortcuts that sounds simple until you realize how much time it saves you every week.
Resize & convert: resize images without downloading a third-party app
How many times have you shared a photo only to find out it was too large, or in the wrong format for where you needed it? Since the iPhone Photos app doesn’t let you resize an image or change its format, I found a simple shortcut to do it.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
The steps are pretty easy, too. You pick the image, set the size, and the shortcut handles the rest. I use this a lot when I need to send images for articles or posts that require specific dimensions.
It handles a task I would otherwise have to do on my Mac or download a third-party app on my iPhone to complete.
I deal with a lot of PDFs, and sometimes I need to extract a few pages to share or save. So I downloaded a shortcut that lets you select specific pages from a PDF and extract them into a new file.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
It sounds like a small thing, but if you have ever had to send someone just two pages from a 40-page PDF, you know how handy this is. You don’t need to download any app, pay a subscription, or open your Mac. Your iPhone handles it in seconds.
Clipboard history: because you always lose what you copied
This is one of the most underrated shortcuts on this list. While macOS has finally added a clipboard history feature with the macOS Tahoe update, the iPhone still doesn’t have a clipboard history. That means every time I copy something on my iPhone, it erases all the previously copied items.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
So I built a shortcut to work around it. Now, every time I copy something on my iPhone, it saves to a note, creating a running clipboard history I can refer back to whenever I need it. The only issue is that I have to run the shortcut manually for it to work.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
So that’s why I have added it to the Back Tap gesture (go to Settings → Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap) on my iPhone. Once I copy something I want to save, I simply tap the back of my iPhone three times to trigger the shortcut and save the copied item in a preassigned note.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
When you download the shortcut, make sure to edit it by tapping the three-dot menu and selecting the note you want to use as your clipboard history.
Turn off mobile data when iPhone connects to Wi-Fi
To balance the manual activation of the last shortcut, I give you one that is pure automation. Once you set it up, you never have to think about it again. The shortcut uses the Shortcuts automation feature to detect when your iPhone connects to a Wi-Fi network and automatically turns off your mobile data.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
I have also set up the companion automation that turns mobile data back on when you leave Wi-Fi. It saves battery life and prevents your phone from uselessly using mobile data when it doesn’t need to. Since this is an automation, there’s no way to share a downloadable link, but you can learn how to create this shortcut. The screenshot should give you the basics of how to do it.
My 7 favorite iPhone shortcuts
I know the Shortcuts app can feel intimidating at first, but most of these require very little setup, and the payoff is immediately obvious. Start with one that solves a problem you have right now, and before long, you will be building your own.
If you have an iPhone and are not using Shortcuts, you are missing out on one of the most powerful tools Apple has built. So, definitely give this a try, and your life will never be the same.
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