Weeks after stepping down as CEO of food delivery service Zomato and its parent company Eternal, Indian entrepreneur Deepinder Goyal is back with $54 million in funding for wearable startup Temple. It's part of what the 43-year-old previously described as a move toward “riskier exploration and experimentation.”
On Friday, Goyal said in a post on X that Temple had raised funding from friends of the founder and early Zomato backers in a friends-and-family round, valuing the company at about $190 million. He said more than 30 employees participated in the same evaluation.
Goyal led the funding round, followed by Steadview Capital, according to regulatory filings reviewed by TechCrunch. Other investors include Peak XV Partners, Info Edge Ventures, Dharana Capital, angel investors such as Paytm's Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED's Kunal Shah, Zerodha's Nithin Kamith and Nikhil Kamith, as well as current and former Eternal executives such as Akshant Goyal, Aditya Mangla, Kunal Swarup, Akriti Chopra and Rahul Ganjoo.
Goyal stepped down as CEO of Zomato and its parent company Eternal in January, handing over the job to Arvinder Dhindsa, who heads quick-commerce arm Brinkit. The move marks a major shift for Goyal after nearly two decades at the helm of the food delivery company he co-founded in 2008.
Temple is one of the clearest expressions of that change yet. The startup focuses on building high-performance wearables for elite athletes, an area Goyal describes as ripe for deeper innovation.
In a January conversation with podcaster Raj Sharman, Goyal described Temple's wearable as a sensor designed to be placed on the wearer's temple to continuously track cerebral blood flow.
In a separate post to X earlier Friday, he said Temple aims to build what he calls “the ultimate wearable for elite performance athletes,” claiming the device can measure metrics that existing wearables can't. He also outlined a broad employment drive spanning embedded systems, computational neuroscience, and brain-computer interface engineering.
We are recruiting at @temple.
At Temple, we create the ultimate wearables for elite performance athletes. A device that measures things that no other wearable in the world can measure, with a level of precision that doesn't exist yet.
It takes people with an obsession to build it… pic.twitter.com/iCHaMUwdEw
— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) February 27, 2026
The startup is entering an increasingly crowded and well-funded wearables market. There, companies like Whoop, Oura, and Garmin have spent years refining devices that track sleep, recovery, and athletic performance. Whether Temple can meaningfully differentiate its technology remains an open question.
The move into Temple is part of a broader shift in Goyal's investment focus. In October 2025, he announced that he had committed $25 million of his own capital to another start-up, Continue Research, which is exploring ways to extend human lifespans. He is also the co-founder of aviation startup LAT Aerospace. LAT Aerospace recently expanded into defense technology with the acquisition of early-stage company Sharang Shakti.
Goyal made his name at Zomato, which he co-founded with Pankaj Chadha, and spent nearly two decades building one of India's largest food delivery platforms before stepping down as chief executive earlier this year.
Although Chaddha left the company in 2018, Zomato continued to strengthen its position through acquisitions, including acquiring Uber Eats' India operations in 2020 and grocery delivery platform Brinkit (then known as Grofers) for $568 million in 2022.
Before Temple, Goyal had also backed health and fitness startups including Ultrahuman, an India-based wearables maker that competes with Oura's smart rings, underscoring a growing focus on performance and health technology.
Mr. Goyal declined further comment on Mr. Temple.