Deepinder Goyal, the entrepreneur who co-founded and built Zomato into a food delivery giant, has placed a bold new bet on neurotechnology, securing $54 million in seed funding for his startup Temple at a post-money valuation of approximately $190 million.
Goyal announced the raise on X, describing it as a “friends and family” round that signals his personal shift towards “higher-risk exploration and experimentation.” He himself led the investment, committing around Rs 104 crore ($12.5 million) for a 28.5% stake in the venture, according to reports first covered by TechCrunch.
The funding round attracted a who’s who of Indian startup backers. Institutional investors include Steadview Capital, Peak XV Partners, Info Edge Ventures, Dharana Capital, and Aaroh Fund. A notable cohort of angel investors also participated, featuring Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CRED’s Kunal Shah, and Zerodha founders Nithin and Nikhil Kamath. Over 30 Temple employees invested their personal capital at the same valuation, alongside several current and former executives from Eternal—Zomato’s parent company—such as Akshant Goyal, Aditya Mangla, Kunal Swarup, Akriti Chopra, and Rahul Ganjoo.
A Device to Decode Peak Performance
Temple is developing a high-performance wearable device engineered specifically for elite athletes. Unlike commonplace smartwatches or rings, Temple’s device is designed to be worn near the temple, where it will continuously track cerebral blood flow. The goal, as Goyal explained in a January podcast conversation, is to understand the brain’s activity during moments of peak performance, with potential applications for monitoring memory, focus, stress, sleep, and other cognitive markers.
To realise this vision, Temple is hiring aggressively in specialised fields like embedded systems, computational neuroscience, and brain-computer interface engineering, marking it as a deep-tech hardware venture far removed from standard fitness tracking.
A Founder’s Pivot to Frontier Ventures
The launch of Temple follows a major transition for Goyal, who stepped down as CEO of Zomato and its parent company Eternal in January 2026. He has since assumed the role of Vice Chairman at Eternal, handing over the group CEO position to Albinder Dhindsa, the head of Blinkit, Zomato’s quick-commerce arm.
This move into brain technology is part of a broader portfolio shift for Goyal. In October 2025, he committed $25 million of his own capital to Continue Research, a venture focused on human lifespan extension and aging science, which aims to extend healthy human function. He is also a co-founder of LAT Aerospace, an aviation startup that recently expanded into defence technology through the acquisition of Gurugram-based robotics firm Sharang Shakti, with projects including hybrid-electric regional aircraft and VTOL platforms. Prior to founding Temple, Goyal had already backed health-focused startups, including the wearable maker Ultrahuman.
Ecosystem Endorsement from Key Funds and Figures
The substantial pre-product backing for Temple underscores the strong confidence in Goyal’s vision from within India’s investment community. The institutional investors bring significant heft: Steadview Capital, founded in 2009, is a London-based global investment firm focusing on growth-stage tech; Peak XV Partners, formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA, manages over $10 billion in assets and recently closed $1.3 billion across three new funds in February 2026; and Info Edge Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Info Edge established in 2008, which also launched a new growth-stage fund, B8 Fund-I, that same month.
The angel investors add further validation. Kunal Shah, founder of CRED and co-founder of FreeCharge, is a prolific backer with a portfolio of over 200 companies. The Kamath brothers, Nithin and Nikhil, founders of Zerodha, are likewise active forces in the ecosystem.
Goyal’s legacy stems from Zomato, which he co-founded with Pankaj Chaddah in 2008 as a restaurant directory called “Foodiebay,” rebranding to Zomato in 2010. After nearly two decades building it into one of India’s largest consumer internet companies, his departure from daily operations has cleared the path for this ambitious foray into mapping the human brain.
