In 2008, Deepinder Goyal and one of his colleagues at Bain & Company in Delhi kept noticing the same thing: office workers lining up just to glance at the canteen menu. It was a small, annoying problem, but it sparked an idea. They uploaded PDF scans of nearby restaurant menus onto a website called Foodiebay. That site eventually became Zomato, the food-tech giant that would go public in 2021 and become India’s first consumer tech unicorn.
In early 2026, just weeks after stepping down as Zomato’s CEO, Goyal showed up on a podcast wearing something unexpected: a small device on his forehead called Temple. This wasn’t about food. It was about the brain.
Temple is Goyal’s new wearable startup, and it claims to measure brain blood flow in real time. In its first funding round, the company raised $54 million from friends and family at a valuation of around $190 million. For a startup that hasn’t even launched a consumer product yet, that’s a huge bet on both Goyal’s reputation and on science that hasn’t been fully proven.
Temple’s product is simple in design but complex in promise. It’s a small wearable that sticks to your temple or forehead, like a patch. The device claims to continuously track brain blood flow, giving you real-time readings similar to how fitness bands track your heart rate or Oura rings monitor your sleep.
The idea is that by monitoring and potentially improving brain blood flow, you might slow down aging. Goyal has posted about this theory online, but doctors aren’t convinced yet. The science hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and medical experts are skeptical. Still, investors seem willing to gamble.
Temple is still in development. The company is running third-party studies to validate its metrics before launching publicly. It’s also recruiting people who are serious about fitness and science to help refine the technology. The startup is expected to launch for regular consumers in a few months.
Goyal isn’t doing this alone. He’s running several other companies separately, including Continue, a health-tech project he self-funded with $25 million; LAT Aerospace; and Eternal, Zomato’s listed parent company, which now has a market cap of $32 billion. Temple operates independently from all of them.
The investors backing Temple aren’t strangers. They’re the same people and firms that bet on Goyal early in Zomato’s journey: Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India), Info Edge, Steadview Capital, and Nikhil and Nithin Kamath, the Zerodha founders. These investors watched Goyal turn a simple menu directory into a billion-dollar company. Now they’re betting on him again, even though he’s moving into a much harder field: biotech and longevity.
The $54 million will go toward finishing development and getting Temple ready for the public. Goyal has called this move “higher-risk exploration and experimentation,” which is a fair way to describe it. He’s leaving behind the safe territory of food delivery and stepping into the realm of unproven science.
That’s not without controversy. Temple’s aging theory is still unverified, and some doctors have questioned whether tracking brain blood flow alone can actually slow aging. But the startup’s valuation suggests investors believe Goyal can do it again, that he can turn a risky idea into something real.
Temple is more than just a new startup. It’s a signal of where Indian tech is heading. Deepinder Goyal went from fixing a lunchtime problem to trying to solve one of humanity’s oldest questions: how to age slower.
The path is uncertain. The science is still being tested. The market for longevity wearables is just emerging. But if Temple works, it could change how elite athletes track performance and how everyday people monitor their brain health. If it doesn’t, it’ll still be a landmark story, the moment Zomato’s founder bet his reputation not on food, but on the flow of blood through the human brain.
For India’s tech ecosystem, Temple says something bold: the next big thing might not come from delivery apps or ride-hailing services. It might come from a small device that sticks to your temple and tries to read your mind.