Goyal's New Venture Raises $54M
Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal's new wearable tech startup, Temple, has raised a massive $54M seed round at a $190M valuation. The funding, one of India's largest seeds, saw participation from major VCs like Steadview and Peak XV, signaling strong investor appetite for ambitious consumer tech plays.
The new venture, Temple, is developing a non-invasive wearable device worn on the temple to measure cerebral blood flow. This move into deep-tech hardware is a significant pivot from Goyal's background in food delivery and is aimed at the elite athletic performance market. The product's development is rooted in Goyal's research on how gravity might influence human aging. The $54 million funding was not a typical venture capital round but was described as a "friends and family" round. Every investor was reportedly a friend, a founder, or an early-stage Zomato backer. More than 30 employees of Temple also invested their own money at the same valuation, with Goyal himself contributing Rs 104 crore (about 21% of the round). This venture stems from Goyal’s personal interest in health and longevity, which he began prioritizing in 2019, leading to a significant personal fitness transformation. The idea for Temple emerged from his personal experiments with health optimization, including everything from blood tracking to meditation. His other new venture is an aerospace startup named LAT, co-founded with Zomato's former COO. The company is hiring a specialized team of engineers, neuroscientists, and AI specialists with experience in domains like brain-computer interfaces and deep learning. In a notable move, the company has set a fitness benchmark for applicants, requiring male candidates to have under 16% body fat and females under 26%. This underscores the startup's focus on the high-performance athletic market.
