One of India’s most successful tech billionaires is making his first big bet after stepping down from the food delivery empire he led for 18 years.
Deepinder Goyal plans to launch a bean-shaped device branded Temple in as little as six months. He says the wearable, named for where it is worn — the side of the forehead — is capable of measuring the body’s metabolic state in real time.
“We will launch it as a wellness device with peer-reviewed studies and everything,” Goyal, 43, said in an interview at his sprawling farmhouse in New Delhi. The timeline for the launch could be anywhere between six months to a year, he added.
It will be the first commercial product from his new venture since February when he stepped down as chief executive officer of Eternal Ltd., whose businesses span restaurant delivery, 10-minute grocery drops and event ticketing.
Temple is one of his experiments with high-risk ideas outside the Eternal group. What began as a personal science project to understand cerebral blood flow led to his team discovering a new biomarker he calls “entropy,” he said. That metric correlates with metabolic rate, offering richer insights by measuring changes linked to stress, meditation, recovery, sleep and exercise, he added. The science behind this has yet to be validated by independent scientists.
Goyal has a net worth of $1.3 billion, primarily from his stake in Eternal, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Temple will retail for around $1,000 and is largely aimed at high-performing individuals such as athletes, executives and founders rather than mass-market consumers.
“I’m not building Temple for everybody. Actually, I’m building it only for myself,” he said. “Business is a side effect of what we’re doing for ourselves.”
Temple enters an increasingly crowded market of wearable devices, including watches and rings that already track heart rate, sleep, recovery and fitness metrics. Goyal argued those products rely on heart rate as a proxy for what the body is actually doing, while Temple directly measures metabolic rate.
“Heart rate was supposed to be the proxy for metabolic rate. We found the real thing,” he said. The device has yet to undergo medical regulatory approval.
Beyond Temple, Goyal is also backing LAT Aerospace with a personal investment of $20 million, the Economic Times reported in March last year. It’s an aviation venture aimed at easing congestion in India’s biggest cities by developing low-cost, short takeoff and landing aircraft. His vision is a network of eight-seater planes connecting small airstrips, allowing passengers to bypass major airports and travel directly between cities, towns and villages.
“It’s a very hard project. I have 0.1% expectation that it will work,” he said, citing engineering, regulation and infrastructure challenges. Still, he believes such a network could help spread economic activity beyond India’s largest urban centers.
The long-term ambition extends beyond either venture. Goyal said he wants Eternal, the company formerly known as Zomato, to continually reinvent itself rather than remain defined by its current business.
“The point of Eternal is to make sure the DNA keeps evolving,” he said. “The moment you think that you made it, you’re dead.”
Goyal co-founded Zomato as Foodiebay, a restaurant discovery platform that digitized menus and had reviews. It was rebranded to Zomato in 2010, and later expanded to food deliveries. It went public in 2021. A year later, Zomato acquired online grocer Grofers, which was renamed Blinkit and is now India’s biggest instant delivery firm. The group was renamed Eternal last year.
