Daybreak - Deepinder Goyal built an app that fed Indians. With Temple, can he fix how they age?

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Deepinder Goyal, the founder of Zomato, has a new startup. It's called Temple — a wearable that tracks blood flow in your brain. His theory is that improving that flow could slow down aging. Doctors aren't convinced. Investors seem to be.Temple is valued at 190 million dollars. The science behind it hasn't been peer reviewed. And India has a rapidly aging population that could genuinely use some answers.So who exactly is this for?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too? It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganesh, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. Last week, a job listing went viral for a strange condition. You can't have missed it. But if you did, here's what it was about. Deepender Goel, the founder of Zomato, who is currently the vice chairman of Zomato and Blinket's parent company, eternal.

is building a new venture. It's called Temple and it's a brain health tracking variable that one wears, well, near the temple. And this is a startup that Goyal is actively hiring for. He's looking for people who fit roles like embedded systems engineers, computational neuroscientists and neural decoding researchers. That seems pretty straightforward for the product, right? But here's the twist.

Goyil specified that he wasn't looking for just any talented engineer or scientist. He also needed them to have a very specific amount of body fat. Less than 16% for men and less than 26% for women. Of course, the internet lost its mind. The most obvious joke here was that to meet Goyle's body fat requirement, you would probably have to stop using the very app that made him billions. Now, Temple is supposed to be tracking the cerebral blood flow of its wearer. Goyle claims that according to his research, a reduction in that flow as one ages is what causes a decline in brain health, and Temple is supposed to help reverse that.

Now, Goyle's newest passion project is interesting and perhaps even odd, but it's also not a brand new scenario. For quite a few years now, several tech founders have been investing and backing up biohacking or longevity projects. billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg have all poured billions into anti-aging science over the last decade. Another group of Silicon Valley founders and leaders, think Brian Johnson, have taken it a step further and been the subject of experimental procedures themselves and have been documenting the changes they've observed along the way. Goyal is simply one of the first to bring this trend and philosophy to India in a big way.

No one can really tell for sure why tech billionaires are so obsessed with longevity and anti-aging. There are definitely a bunch of theories that they can afford to care about mortality now, that they are not bothered with the basic demands of life that the rest of us have to deal with, like rent and bills. Or that they're just wired with the instinct of optimizing and fixing every problem they come across, and death and bodies that age are just one of them. Or it could be very simple and far less philosophies. Like the fact that the longevity sector is estimated to generate nearly $8 trillion in annual economic activity.

That's according to the focus of an American wealth management firm called UBS. But there's also a structural reason. The thing is, institutional sciences just won't touch this area. Government aging research is chronically underfunded across the world. Indian institutes are far more underfunded than, say, American ones and are mostly focused on finding solutions to specific diseases like, say, cancer or diabetes. Also, funding constraints mean that academic scientists avoid the longevity space because it's considered fringe and far too experimental. And this vacuum is exactly where private

founder-led money is flooding in. Ideally, that shouldn't be a bad thing. But the question is, if this research is being led by tech founders without backgrounds in health and science, and if it's not addressing institutional research gaps and if it's being funded by profit-minded investors, who is it really for and who gets to age well? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Jachir Warkis, and every day of the week,

my co-host, Nikola Sharma and I will bring you one news story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 5th of March. India could actually use some research into longevity science right about now. That's what makes founder-led entries into this space interesting and worth taking a closer look at. Let's take a look at the numbers. A 2020 study showed that India's population is rapidly aging. The share of individuals

aged 60 years or older is projected to increase to nearly 20% of the total Indian population by 2050. In 2024, business standard reported that more than 7% of Indians age 60 and above are affected by dementia. By 2036, this number is only expected. to rise from the current 8.8 million to 17 million. That's a 97% increase. And even though life expectancy has steadily increased over the last few years, a researcher at the Regional Center for Biotechnology flat some issues in a 2019 journal piece. They basically stated that living longer doesn't necessarily translate into living better. More and more elderly folk are living with multiple morbidities as they grow older.

Eventually, families will find themselves spending more on caring for their elders and even the government would have to account for an increasingly large slice of the economy being dedicated just to manage the health needs of an aging population. Like I mentioned before, even in India's leading centers and universities, the main research programs are predominantly dedicated towards treatment of individual diseases. Think cancer, infectious diseases, neurological and eye diseases. The lack of funding for institutes and national centres is a well-documented fact. And that funding becomes even thinner when it comes to science that's a little bit more on the speculative side like longevity or anti-aging. It's mainly because any funded studies or experiments in a space like anti-aging and longevity take much longer to show tangible results. Think about it. To see if any medication or lifestyle changes or drugs are having effects on lifespan, you have to wait at least a few decades.

Even if someone were to incorporate these changes at, say, 40, meaningful results are unlikely to materialize before they're in their 70s or 80s. Animal studies, of course, just don't translate the same way onto humans. Plus, clinical studies are hard enough to design, fund and execute even for drugs and medication for specific diseases, where outcomes are observed over months. So you can imagine how difficult it would be to study human beings over decades while they're out living in the real world. Enter private funding.

After what I just told you, it doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing, right? But here's where it gets complicated. Goyal's hiring post went up the same day he announced a funding round for Temple. He'd raised about $54 million in a friends and family round with Temple being valued at $119 million. See, the moment you involve investors like peak 15, they are envisioning returns on their investment and well, that is within their lifetimes. That's just how the logic of private capital works.

And it makes sense when you see exactly how Goyles move into this space is playing out. He began by launching his research effort called Continue Research. This was entirely funded through his private capital. Then he published his gravity aging hypothesis. This hypothesis was not published in some kind of peer-reviewed journal. Instead, it was published on the Continue Research website and on Goel's Twitter. The hypothesis basically proposes that an upright posture causes gravity to reduce cerebral blood flow, which is basically blood flow to the brain by up to 17%.

As a person ages, there's a chronic reduction in that flow, and that reduction is what gradually weakens the regions of the brain that control hormones, metabolism, and inflammation. Now, this theory does align with pure-reviewed research from the Harvard Brain Science Initiative, which found that cerebral blood flow or CBF steadily declines with age and may be the reason behind cognitive deterioration and dementia. But that's where the academic science ends.

It does not say that the primary cause behind the slowing flow is gravity. It also does not claim that reversing it can slow the aging process. So here's where the leap begins. Stay tuned. Goel is arguing that inversion therapy can partially reverse this decline. Inversion therapy is quite literally being upside down, so that the blood flows down towards the head from the heart and not upwards, essentially so that the blood flow is aided by gravity instead of fighting against it. This is Goyle's own proposed intervention, 10 minutes daily on an inversion table. It reportedly showed a 7% rise in brain blood flow over 6 weeks, which he claims could offset a decade of age-related decline.

The scientific community was not impressed. Dr. Syriac Abbey Phillips, who also goes by the liver doctor online, responded to the hypothesis by saying that the research commits a fundamental category error by mistaking the physical force of gravity for the complex multifactorial biological process of aging. He also claimed that the evidence cited in his support, drawn from astronaut physiology, bad longevity and human height correlations consists of misconduct. interpreted data, bogus correlations, and significant logical fallacies. Even the 7% claim itself has problems that go just beyond the theory. The claim has not been peer-reviewed or independently replicated. Because what we don't know is Goyle's methodology. How many people participated in this trial?

What was the demographic? And how exactly is this offset even being measured? And if this brain flow was measured by the temple device, has it been independently validated as an appropriate tool for this purpose? We don't know. And this is where the issues become clearer. Temple, the wearable, is in fact built to continuously track cerebral blood flow and test this hypothesis in real time. It is the product that validates the research. And the research is what gives the product its reason to exist. Here's what Dr. Svrancar Datta from AIMS had to say. As a physician scientist and one of the earliest researchers in India in arterial

stiffness and pulse wave velocity, which predicts cardiovascular mortality, I can assure you that this device currently has zero scientific standing as a useful device and do not waste your hard-earned money to buy fancy toys billionaires can afford to waste money on. Goel responded to this by saying that the doctor was advising people not to buy an unvalidated device that isn't even available to order or pre-order yet. He called it funny. Then he went on to say that if and when Temple was to be sold as a commercial product, all the science would be released then. Which is precisely the problem. There are obviously other ways to observe cerebral blood flow, like MRIs and PEDs, for example.

The idea of temple in that way is actually novel and a space that could benefit from being filled. There is no device that observes CBF non-invasively and in real time. But doctors have pointed out that the kind of surface sensor temple is likely to have will not do all the work by this. itself. You would still need to resort to the classic methods for usable data. And even if you put aside the holes in the scientific argument, the thing is, once outside investors are involved, the question isn't just about scientific rigor anymore. There's no indication that this is some kind of philanthropic funding that's happening. And if Temple is possibly not going to be sold commercially, especially if it's supposed to be so groundbreaking, who is it for? And if it is,

who can afford it? And what exactly? are they buying? More on this in the next segment. Like I mentioned earlier, in India, there are very few, if any, institutes that are actually focused on research on the process of aging, preventing or delaying age-related diseases. Even in the US, which is the world's biggest biomedical funder, only about 350 million of the National Institutes of Health's entire budget goes towards aging biology itself. Of course, Indian institutes are far more underfunded than American ones. In a 2023 medical journal editorial, two Indian doctors noted that a review of AIMS itself

identified shortage of time, lack of equipment, limited statistical training and inadequate funding as structural problems. Then, they recorded something even more damning, that the prevailing strong hierarchical and authoritative setup in medical institutions is detrimental to the zeal of young and proficient faculty who desire to go beyond the conventional. You can imagine how tough it would be to secure funding or even put together a proposal for what would be a very expensive and expansive research endeavor if the infrastructure doesn't exist and the will to experiment is slowly being stifled. In a 2025 article published by science business, Benkei Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Prize winning structural biologist, explained why aging science is so underfunded. He said that it is hard to know how much to balance research on aging versus, say, cancer or infectious disease that still plagues much of the poorer parts of the world, such as Africa or Asia. But still, privately funded research, at least the way it's happening now, doesn't want to deal with the real timelines of speculative longevity study. It wants to be flashy and photogenic, able to make headlines when a founder wears a futuristic-looking disc on his temple on a podcast. In fact, in the same science business article, Andrew Scott, an economist at the London Business School who studies longevity, flagged another concern.

That privately funded research will focus on treatments only the wealthy can access. He argues that the bigger public health win isn't just living longer, it's living more of those years in good health. And that's a goal he believes that public funding is more likely to work towards. Take Temple again, for example. It's a company that's valued at $119 million. Even at a hiring stage, it's targeting elite athletes, or at least people built like elite athletes. And that's already setting a precedent for who this research is supposed to help.

And that only shows that at least for now, private funding is not filling the gap. It's creating a separate track altogether. It's defining a new set of problems and even the ways in which it can solve those problems. and whether regular folks like you and I are part of that equation is exactly the question that hangs on the balance. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website.

Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.