Weeks after stepping down as CEO from food delivery service Zomato and its parent Eternal, Indian entrepreneur Deepinder Goyal is back with a $54 million raise for wearable startup Temple, part of what the 43-year-old earlier described as a shift toward “higher-risk exploration and experimentation.”
On Friday, Goyal said in a post on X that Temple had raised funds in a friends-and-family round from founder friends and early Zomato backers, at a post-money valuation of about $190 million. More than 30 employees participated at the same valuation, he said.
Goyal stepped down as chief executive of Zomato and its parent, Eternal, in January, handing the role to Albinder Dhindsa, who leads the quick-commerce unit Blinkit. The move marked a major transition 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 yet of that shift. The startup is focused on building a high-performance wearable for elite athletes, an area Goyal has described as ripe for deeper technological innovation.
During a January conversation with podcaster Raj Shamani, Goyal described Temple’s wearable as a sensor designed to sit on the wearer’s temple and continuously track cerebral blood flow.
In a separate post on X earlier Friday, he said Temple aims to build what he called “the ultimate wearable for elite performance athletes,” claiming the device would measure metrics that existing wearables cannot. He also outlined an expansive hiring push spanning embedded systems, computational neuroscience, and brain–computer interface engineering.
We're recruiting at @temple.
At Temple, we are building the ultimate wearable for elite performance athletes. A device that measures what no other wearable in the world measures, with a level of precision that doesn't exist yet.
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