Deepinder Goyal's next big bets: $1,000 forehead wearable, $20 mn aviation investment after Zomato

After leading Zomato to become one of India's biggest consumer tech success stories, Deepinder Goyal is now turning his attention toward wearable tech.

Goyal plans to launch a bean-shaped wearable device called Temple in the next 6 months to 1 year. He says the wearable, named for where it is worn — the side of the forehead — is designed to track the body's metabolic state in real time.

“We will launch it as a wellness device with peer-reviewed studies and everything,” Goyal, 43, told Bloomberg. It will be the first commercial product from his new venture.

Explaining how the device was developed, the entrepreneur said, “What began as a personal science project to understand cerebral blood flow led to his team discovering a new biomarker he calls entropy.”

This metric is linked to the body's metabolic rate and can provide insights into stress, meditation, recovery, sleep and exercise by tracking changes in the body's condition. However, the science behind this has yet to be validated by independent scientists.

Temple will retail for around $1,000 and is aimed primarily at high-performing individuals, such as athletes, executives, and founders, rather than mass-market consumers.

“I’m not building Temple for everybody. Actually, I’m building it only for myself,” he said. “Business is a side effect of what we’re doing for ourselves.”

As Temple enters the crowded market of wearable devices, including watches and rings that track several fitness metrics, Goyal points out that those products rely on heart rate as a proxy for what the body is actually doing, while Temple directly measures metabolic rate.

“Heart rate was supposed to be the proxy for metabolic rate. We found the real thing,” he said. The device has not yet received medical regulatory approval.

Beyond Temple, Goyal is also backing LAT Aerospace with a personal investment of $20 million, the Economic Times reported in March last year.

LAT Aerospace is an aviation startup aimed at reducing traffic at India's busy airports by building low-cost aircraft that can take off and land on short runways. He wants to create a network of small, eight-seater planes that connect smaller airstrips, making it easier for people to travel directly between cities, towns and villages without passing through major airports.

“It’s a very hard project. I have 0.1% expectation that it will work,” he said, citing engineering, regulation and infrastructure challenges. Still, he believes such a network could help spread economic activity beyond India’s largest urban centers.

The long-term ambition extends beyond either venture. Goyal said he wants Eternal, the company formerly known as Zomato, to continually reinvent itself rather than remain defined by its current business.

“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.”

Deepinder Goyal co-founded Zomato, originally launched as Foodiebay in 2008, and rebranded it in 2010, expanding it into food delivery. The company went public in 2021, acquired Grofers (later renamed Blinkit) in 2022.