Deepinder Goyal on Technology Pivot

The founders quit their consulting jobs in November 2009 to run FoodieBay full-time, then in November 2010 renamed it Zomato — partly because they were unsure they would stay only in food, and partly to avoid a trademark clash with eBay. The pivot to a more abstract brand marked the first of several identity refreshes that would culminate in the 2025 rebrand to Eternal Ltd.

Goyal pushed Zomato into food delivery in March 2015, originally leaning on third-party logistics like Delhivery and Runnr before acquiring Runnr in 2017 to bring a delivery fleet in-house. That infrastructural pivot — from a software marketplace into a hybrid tech-plus-logistics operator — set the unit-economics battle that Zomato would fight against Swiggy for the next decade.

After stepping down as Eternal CEO, Goyal has begun preparing Temple — a forehead-worn wellness device measuring the body's metabolic state in real time, priced around a thousand dollars and targeted at athletes, founders and executives. The device marks Goyal's first major venture outside the food delivery orbit and a pivot toward deep-tech health hardware.

By 2015 Zomato's board had concluded that menu aggregation alone was a thin moat; the company moved into food delivery in India, initially outsourcing last-mile logistics to Delhivery, Grab and Runnr. The Runnr acquisition in 2017 in-sourced the fleet and gave Zomato the operational backbone to compete with Swiggy on its own terms.

The company was hit by a 2017 security breach in which about 17 million user records were stolen. The incident prompted Zomato to publish a detailed technical post-mortem explaining how the breach occurred, a transparency choice that contrasted with the more reticent handling of similar incidents at peer platforms and which Goyal later cited as a governance touchstone.