Deepinder Goyal explains why he left Zomato for Temple
Temple offers 14-day, no-questions-asked returns, which he noted even Apple doesn’t offer in India, so a device that failed to deliver would be exposed within days. He said Temple has cost $30 million so far, $20 million of it his own, and that a few thousand units would recover only a fraction of that. Temple 01 ships in early 2027 with both AI and health features, pre-orders are open, and he is already talking about what Temple 20 might look like.
Because a mic records everyone in the room, he argues that privacy is a basic human right, and that every voice AI device sold as the next computing interface breaks it the moment its microphone switches on,.
Deepinder Goyal says Temple was never meant to be his next big bet. In a vision note titled “Humanity’s Last Personal Device”, the Zomato founder writes that he began building a health wearable as a weekend project while he was still CEO of Eternal, the company formerly known as Zomato. Goyal calls Temple “a project, not a product” and says health remains its north star.
That project led to an engineering breakthrough, and the breakthrough is what pulled him out of Eternal to build Temple full-time. Goyal’s reasoning starts with a grievance. He writes that he hates it when people walk into meetings with him with their AI note-taker running. His first argument was commercial. A scam that pays nothing, he wrote, isn’t one anyone would run.