'I'm not building Temple for everybody': Deepinder Goyal eyes wearable's launch in a year

After Zomato's resounding success story, Deepinder Goyal has bet his hopes on the healthtech and aerospace sectors. Goyal said his next venture isn't meant to be a mass-market product, according to Bloomberg.

“I’m not building Temple for everybody. Actually, I’m building it only for myself,” the former Eternal chief executive said of his new bean-shaped wearable device.

Goyal claims can measure the body's metabolic state directly rather than relying on conventional indicators. “Business is a side effect of what we’re doing for ourselves.”

Temple is designed to compete in the fast-growing wearables market, but Goyal believes existing smartwatches and fitness rings are measuring only a proxy. While current devices track heart rate to estimate the body's condition, Temple is built to measure metabolic rate in real time. “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.

Goyal, 43, said in an interview with Bloomberg that Temple will be launched as a wellness device within six months to a year. “We will launch it as a wellness device with peer-reviewed studies and everything,” he said. The wearable, named after where it is worn — the side of the forehead — is expected to retail for around $1,000 and is aimed at high-performing users such as athletes, executives and founders rather than mass-market consumers.

Temple will be the first commercial product from Goyal's new venture since he stepped down as chief executive officer of Eternal Ltd. in February. He described it as one of his experiments with high-risk ideas outside the Eternal group.

What began as a personal science project to understand cerebral blood flow eventually led his team to discover a new biomarker he calls "entropy", according to Goyal.

He said the metric correlates with metabolic rate and provides insights into stress, meditation, recovery, sleep and exercise by directly measuring changes in the body's metabolic state. However, the science behind the biomarker has yet to be validated by independent scientists. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Goyal has a net worth of $1.3 billion, largely from his stake in Eternal.

Beyond Temple, Goyal is also backing LAT Aerospace with a personal investment of $20 million. The aviation startup aims to reduce congestion in India's largest cities by developing low-cost, short takeoff and landing aircraft. His vision is a network of eight-seater planes connecting small airstrips, enabling 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. Even so, Goyal believes such a network could help spread economic activity beyond India's largest urban centres.

Looking further ahead, Goyal said he wants Eternal — the company formerly known as Zomato — to continue reinventing itself rather than remain tied to its current businesses. “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 digitised menus and reviews, before rebranding it as Zomato in 2010 and expanding into food delivery. The company went public in 2021. A year later, it acquired online grocer Grofers, which was renamed Blinkit and has since become India's largest instant delivery platform. The group itself was renamed Eternal last year.

With Temple expected to launch within six months to a year and LAT Aerospace emerging as another high-risk bet, Goyal's post-Eternal chapter is focused on experimenting beyond the business empire he spent 18 years building.