Adithya Ravi

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Temple's first validation study is out.

Researchers tested Temple's Brain Flow index head-to-head against Transcranial Doppler (TCD), the gold standard for measuring cerebrovascular function. 23 healthy adults, two challenges: cycling and a standing-to-supine postural shift.

The result that stood out most to me: when participants lay down, their heart rate dropped, but their brain blood flow went up. Temple tracked this accurately, right alongside the Doppler. Any device that only measures heart rate would have gotten this completely wrong.

Across both challenges, Temple's Brain Flow tracked Middle Cerebral Artery velocity (MCAv) with within-subject temporal correlation of r≈0.8 (p<0.001), which is very high even for medical devices.

The paper is posted as a preprint and submitted for peer review. One study, two interventions, healthy adults only, but it's the first step. More validations on Brain Flow, as well as on Entropy with different modalities are underway across the globe. We will keep sharing them as they trickle in.

We encourage researchers to replicate this. We'll happily loan Temples to any qualified researcher who wants to pressure-test any of our metrics independently.

https://t.co/86vUY9YQbV

Cc @agingroy

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Temple is now less than half the size of what you've seen so far.

Volumetrically, Temple is now the smallest wearable on the market, and the most^10 powerful. Living and training with Temple is going to change your life.

We will start taking pre-orders for our limited launch edition @temple very soon - shipping before the end of 2026. Join our mailing list on https://t.co/XxGR9Hpq58 to stay up to date.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

If you used to work at Zomato, whether you chose to move on, or I was the one who asked you to leave, this is for you.

I know that for many of you, Zomato didn't have the environment, or the leadership you needed at the time. But I know for sure, that you loved being at Zomato, and it is quite possible that you never felt like home anywhere else since you left.

We have over four hundred people at Eternal today in their second or third stints. Many of them are doing their best work now. Maybe because they've grown, but also because the company has grown. We are more organised, a little less chaotic, and hopefully, I've learned a few things along the way too.

If you haven't reached out because you think the door is closed, or because you think I'm holding onto the past, I'm not. I want you back.

There is so much to build at Eternal. We are today, a family of companies. Zomato, Blinkit Quick-Commerce, Blinkit Ambulances, District, Hyperpure, Nugget, and Feeding India. We need people who already know what good looks like here, and who care enough to fight for it. There is no better person for that than someone who has been here, left, grown, and wants to come back.

You might say that Eternal is not going to be the same, because I am not the CEO anymore. But ask yourself a question. Did titles ever matter at Eternal? I am still very much here, and I'd love for you to be a part of this next phase of Eternal.

If you feel like you have unfinished business here, please don't overthink it. Write to me at [email protected]. The Gurgaon pollution is still a bug, but being at Eternal is the feature. Let's talk and find a role that fits your life as it is today.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Most of our delivery partners did not want to go on a strike yesterday. The 0.1% miscreants I mentioned in the tweet below were illegally snatching parcels from those who wanted to work, beating them up, and threatening to damage their bikes. Which is why local law authorities had to intervene on their own.

So who were these riders who were creating this trouble? Largely the ones who were terminated by the system for repeated abuse and fraud on the platform. They impersonate, steal food, and also abscond with the cash they collect from the customers, amongst other things.

These individuals want to arm twist us to let them back on to the platforms, and exploit the system for their own sake. And are perhaps being supported and instigated by politically motivated individuals who just want to stir up chaos for media mileage.

[Sanjeev Bikhchandani @sbikh]

It will be useful to check on the Blinkit app how far the store is from your home. In my case it is 400 metres. That is how I get the delivery in under 10 mins. The riders are not forced to take risks. Very often they are on transport that cannot go at speed and very often they do not even go onto a main road

[Sahib Puniani @sahibpuniani]

I want to respond to this with the perspective of someone who has been in the cloud kitchen and food business for over a decade, before Swiggy and Zomato even existed.

Back then, I ran my own in-house delivery rider fleet. I know exactly what it takes to keep riders on payroll, and I also know the reality that rarely gets spoken about. It was extremely difficult for small business owners. Fake vehicle maintenance claims, inflated fuel expenses, constant disputes, unionising purely to increase per-order payouts, absenteeism, and zero accountability were routine issues.
Not saying all riders were bad—but a significant majority acted only in their own self-interest, often at the cost of the business that employed them.

What Deepinder and Zomato attempted—and largely succeeded in doing—was to organise a completely unorganised sector and take away one of the biggest operational headaches for small restaurants and startups: managing a delivery fleet. Yes, commissions and ads sometimes feel painful and eat into margins. But if not for platforms like Zomato and Swiggy, many of today’s food businesses would never have been able to start at all, let alone scale or become profitable.

I say this with complete honesty and first-hand experience:
maintaining riders on payroll is not easy—at all.

These platforms have also created massive opportunities for the unskilled workforce, giving flexible earning potential to millions and pushing our economy forward. That impact cannot be dismissed.

Now coming to the so-called “peaceful strike.”

What we are seeing is not a movement for the betterment of honest gig workers. It is being hijacked by bad actors—the same crooks that exist in every informal economy—who want more money without accountability or hard work. Blocking others from working, intimidation, and violence is gunda-gardi, not protest. Dressing it up as a workers’ movement doesn’t change that reality.

I have personally dealt with such elements in the past. They don’t fight for fairness—they fight for free money and leverage, and in the process they end up spoiling a genuinely good opportunity for lakhs of honest earners who simply want to work, earn, and move ahead.

Peaceful protest is everyone’s right.
But coercion, violence, and stopping others from earning a livelihood is not justice—it’s exploitation under the disguise of activism.

And calling that out does not make one anti-worker. It makes one honest.

[Sanjeev Bikhchandani @sbikh]

Very well written @deepigoyal Every word is true. It beggars belief that a Champagne Socialist who married a film star and had a designer wedding in Udaipur and a first wedding anniversary in Maldives has the audacity to then shed crocodile tears around alleged exploitation of gig workers. Aam Aadmi my foot

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Facts below (1/5):

In 2025, average earnings per hour (EPH), excluding tips, for a delivery partner on Zomato were ₹102.
In 2024, this number was ₹92. That’s a ~10.9% year-on-year increase. Over a longer horizon also, EPH has shown steady growth.

Most delivery partners work for a few hours and only a few days in a month. But if someone were to work for 10 hours/day, 26 days/month, this translates to ~₹26,500/month in gross earnings. After accounting for fuel and maintenance (~20%), the net earnings for the partner are ~₹21,000/month.

Note: Earnings per hour are calculated on total hours logged in, including the time when the partner might be waiting to receive an order. Earnings per “busy hour” will be higher but that’s not the right metric to look at.

On top of this - delivery partners earn 100% of tips given by customers. The average tip per hour in 2025 on Zomato was INR 2.6 and in 2024 was INR 2.4 per hour. Tips are transferred instantly, with zero deductions. We absorb the payment gateway processing cost ourselves. About 5% of the orders get tipped on Zomato; 2.5% on Blinkit.

[Sanjeev Bikhchandani @sbikh]

Thanks for putting out these details in Public @deepigoyal I can testify to the fact that discussions on delivery partner welfare and fair compensation occupy a significant percentage of the time in Board meetings. The management and the board are bothered about these.
Now the people who ran this campaign and unsuccessfully tried to organise a strike could have written or come over and asked for this information and got it and had a discussion. However they preferred to instead launch a campaign on social media - it suited them and their political agenda better

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Gig workers GET welfare benefits AND long term support. (4/5)

In 2025, Zomato and Blinkit spent over ₹100 crore on insurance coverage for delivery partners. These premiums are borne entirely by us, and the benefits are administered with record speed without any fuss.

Coverage includes:

1. Accident insurance with coverage of up to INR 10 lakh:
2. Medical insurance with coverage of INR 1 lakh plus OPD coverage of INR 5,000
3. Loss of pay insurance of up to INR 50,000
4. Maternity insurance with coverage of up to INR 40,000

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Beyond insurance, we’ve added other forms of support where gaps are most visible. (5/5)

1. Period rest days of 2 days per month for women delivery partner
2. Support in filing income tax returns (95,000 delivery partners leveraged this)
3. Access to a gig-variant of National Pension Scheme (54,000 delivery partners enrolled in PRAN under NPS, enabling long-term retirement savings)
4. SOS Service for immediate support in case of emergencies, including accidents, vehicle breakdown, theft etc.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Quick commerce’s 10-minute promise DOES NOT put pressure on gig workers, and it DOESN’T lead to unsafe driving. Why? (3/5)

The most common concern is that faster delivery promises translate into pressure on delivery partners to drive unsafely. That isn’t how the system operates.

Firstly, delivery partners are not shown customer-facing time promises. There is no “10-minute timer” or countdown in the delivery app.

10 mins or faster deliveries are primarily due to our stores being closer to customers and not by higher speeds on the road.

In 2025, the average distance travelled per order on Blinkit was 2.03 km. Average driving time was ~8 minutes, which implies an average speed of ~16 km/h.

On Zomato, where delivery times are longer, average driving speeds in 2025 were ~21 km/h.

As you can see, average driving speeds are broadly similar across Zomato and Blinkit: 10 vs 30 min delivery time is not affected by driving speed.

Road safety, I agree, remains one of the hardest challenges in any logistics ecosystem. Which needs to be solved with shared responsibility across road builders, rule enforcers, customers and delivery partners alike, regardless of the platform they work with.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Delivery partners are not overworked on our platforms. (2/5)

In 2025, the average delivery partner on Zomato worked 38 days in the year and 7 hours per working day, reflecting true gig style participation rather than fixed schedules. Only 2.3% of partners worked more than 250 days in the year. Demanding full-time employee benefits like PF, or guaranteed salaries for gig roles doesn’t align with what the model is built for.

Delivery partners are not assigned shifts or geographies. They determine when to log in and log out, and their area of work in a specific city. Partners also have the freedom to add or remove a desired work area based on their preferences. Once a partner opts into a gig, the only expectation is availability for the duration of that gig; beyond this, there are no participation requirements.

This shows that gig work is a reliable source of secondary income for delivery partners which is available to them all 365 days of the year. It is used as a flexible, stop-gap earning option, not a long-term lock-in.

Flexibility isn't incidental to the gig model, it is the whole point.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Last one on this topic, and I have been holding this in myself for a while.

For centuries, class divides kept the labor of the poor invisible to the rich. Factory workers toiled behind walls, farmers in distant fields, domestic help in backrooms. The wealthy consumed the fruits of that labor without ever seeing the faces or the fatigue behind it. No direct encounter, no personal guilt.

The gig economy shattered that invisibility, at unprecedented scale.

Suddenly, the poor aren't hidden away. They're at your doorstep: the delivery partner handing over your ₹1000+ biryani, late-night groceries, or quick-commerce essentials. You see them in the rain, heat, traffic, often on borrowed bikes, working 8–10 hours for earnings that give them sustenance. You see their exhaustion, their polite smile masking frustration with life in general.

This is the first time in history at this scale that the working class and consuming class interact face-to-face, transaction after transaction. And that discomfort with our own selves is why we are uncomfortable about the gig economy. We want these people to look our part, so that the guilt we feel while taking orders from them feels less.

We aren't just debating economics. We are confronting guilt. That ₹800 order might equal their entire day's earnings after fuel, bike rent, and app cuts. We tip awkwardly, or avoid eye contact, because the inequality is no longer abstract. It's personal.

Pre-gig era, the rich could enjoy luxury without moral discomfort. Labor was out of sight. Now, every doorbell ring is a reminder of systemic inequality. That's why debates explode. It's not just policy. It's emotional reckoning. Some defend the system (“they choose it”), others demand change (“this isn't progress, its exploitation”).

And here’s the uncomfortable twist: the unsaid ask of clumsy ‘solutions’ isn’t dignity. It is about returning to invisibility.

Ban gig work and you don’t solve inequality. You remove livelihoods. These jobs don’t magically reappear as formal, protected employment the next day. They disappear, or they get pushed back into the informal economy where there are even fewer protections and even less accountability. Over-regulate it until the model breaks, and you achieve the same outcome through paperwork instead of slogans: the work evaporates, prices rise, demand collapses, and the people we claim to protect are the first to lose income.

And then what happens?

The rich get their old comfort back. Convenience returns without faces. Guilt dissolves. We go back to clean abstractions and moral posturing from a distance. The poor don’t become safer, they become invisible again: back in cash economies, back in backrooms, back in shadows where regulation rarely reaches and dignity isn’t even debated.

The gig economy just exposed the reality of inequality to the people who previously had the luxury of not seeing it. The doorbell is not the problem. The question is what we do after opening the door.

Visibility is the price of progress. We can either use this discomfort to build something better (which we keep doing continuously as delivery partners are our backbone), or we can ban and over-regulate our way back into ignorance. One of those choices improves lives. The other simply helps the consuming class feel virtuous in the dark.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

One more thing. Our 10 minute delivery promise is enabled by the density of stores around your homes. It’s not enabled by asking delivery partners to drive fast. Delivery partners don’t even have a timer on their app to indicate what was the original time promised to the customer.

After you place your order on Blinkit, it is picked and packed within 2.5 minutes. And then the rider drives an average of under 2kms in about 8 minutes. That's an average of 15kmph.

I understand why everybody thinks why 10 minutes must be risking lives, because it is indeed hard to imagine the sheer complexity of the system design which enables quick deliveries.

Also, if you've ever wanted to know why millions of Indians voluntarily take up platform work and sometimes even prefer it to regular jobs, JUST ASK any rider partner when you get your next food or grocery order.

You will be humbled by how rational and honest they will be with you.

Having said that, no system is perfect, and we are all for making it better than today. However, it is far from what it is being portrayed on social media by people who don't understand how our system works and why.

If I were outside the system, I would also believe that gig workers are being exploited, but that's not true.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Agree. And literally everyone who has a job wants to get paid more. Everyone thinks they deserve better. At the end of the day, market forces decide how much does someone get paid.

Companies reliant on gig economy compete very brutally with each other. Demand is more than the supply, which results in gig incomes being more than what many formal entry level jobs in India pay.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Agree.

I repeat – gig workers is one of the largest organised job creation engines in India. And we provide insurance, fair, timely and predictable wages.

Gig doesn’t need more regulation, it needs less regulation. It will bring more people into the fold, who will be able to earn some money, upskill themselves and later join India’s organised workforce. Not to mention, consistently send their kids to school - which will fundamentally change the fabric of our nation one generation later.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

I am all for peaceful protests against anything and everything. But violent protests and stopping others who want to work from working is not okay (proof attached).

Here’s what we know – a number of these protestors were not even our delivery partners. They were agents of political interests, piggybacking on the narrative to gain political mileage.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Zomato and Blinkit delivered at a record pace yesterday, unaffected by calls for strikes that many of us heard over the past few days.

Support from local law enforcement helped keep the small number of miscreants in check, enabling 4.5 lakh+ delivery partners across both platforms to deliver more than 75 lakh orders (all-time high) to over 63 lakh customers during the day. This happened without any additional incentives for delivery partners - NYE does see higher incentives than usual days and yesterday was no different than the past NYE days.

I am grateful to local authorities across the country and to our teams on the ground for clear enforcement and swift coordination.

Most importantly, thank you to our delivery partners who showed up despite intimidation, stood their ground, and chose honest work and progress.

One thought for everyone: if a system were fundamentally unfair, it would not consistently attract and retain so many people who choose to work within it. Please don’t get swept up by narratives pushed by vested interests.

The gig economy is one of India’s largest organised job creation engines, and its real impact will compound over time, when delivery partners’ children, supported by stable incomes and education, enter the workforce and help transform our country at scale.

[Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal]

Coming soon.

Follow @temple for more updates.