Tech billionaires are obsessed with living longer & a new business frontier
A sensor secretly affixed to his forehead instantly places him in Silicon Valley’s strangest and most ambitious club: billionaires trying to overcome death.
Goyal, CEO of Eternal (the parent company of Zomato and Blinkit), has spent 2025 shuttling between food delivery, instant commerce, and new experiments. It now takes a sharper turn towards deep tech and longevity. With Temple, a wearable device designed to monitor brain blood flow in real time, Goyal has become the latest tech founder to bet that aging is just a technical problem waiting for a solution.
He’s not quite alone. Talk of turning 100 has moved from science fiction to geopolitics; China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin were caught on a hot mic earlier this year talking about living to 150. And for more than a decade, tech leaders have been pouring money into extending human lifespans.
Goyal’s entry marks India’s highest-profile entry into the global movement hitherto dominated by US tech founders.
So why are so many tech entrepreneurs and not traditional pharmaceutical giants driving this space?
Also Read: Stanford researchers have developed a brain computer that can read your thoughts, but it needs a ‘mind code’ first. Here’s how it works.
Why tech founders think they can hack death
Unlike Big Pharma, tech billionaires have a very different worldview: Death is a problem of engineering, not fate.
Peter Thiel, who supports Unity Biotechnology and the Methuselah Foundation, once told Business Insider (2012): “There are a lot of people who say death is natural… nothing could be further from the truth.”
They’re wired for moon shots. They have developed software worth billions; they now frame biology, cognition, and aging in the same way, as systems that can be optimized.
They can afford to wait. Longevity research takes decades. Tech founders have both the capital and patience to make long-term bets.
There’s also real money to be won. As early as 2019, Bank of America predicted that the anti-aging and longevity industry could reach $600 billion by 2025, thanks to genomics, AI health, “immortality” technology, and moonlighting medicine. BofA said genomics alone could be a $41 billion market by 2025.
They see a transformation at the species level. Sam Altman of OpenAI, which invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences to add ten years to human lifespan, told Business Insider that longevity requires an “OpenAI-type effort.”
This is technology’s characteristic combination of hubris and idealism: the belief that they can reprogram life itself.
global longevity club
The cast is now familiar:
Jeff Bezos He reportedly supports Altos Labs, which aims to reverse the disease through cellular rejuvenation.
Peter Thiel spent millions on anti-aging drugs, regenerative medicine and cryonics.
Larry Ellison Prior to 2013, he directed over $430 million in grants to aging research through the Ellison Medical Foundation.
Larry Page He founded Calico Labs in 2013 and is now considered a pioneer of Altos.
Sergey Brin He has spent more than $1 billion on Parkinson’s research and helped develop Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan founded the Breakthrough Prize and dedicated millions to life sciences research through CZI.
Bryan JohnsonPerhaps biohacking’s poster child has slowed down his “biological age” with a $2 million-a-year regimen.
It’s a mix of corporate ventures, moonshot laboratories, and a culture of extreme personal experimentation.
Also Read: Apple to develop brain-computer interface following path set by Elon Musk’s Neuralink
Temple: Deepinder Goyal’s foray into brain technology
The new wearable device, introduced in December, aims to continuously monitor brain blood flow.
Goyal also clarified that Temple is not a part of Eternal, suggesting that he sees it as an independent deeptech startup.
Temple parallels a global increase in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). According to a 2024 report by the World Economic Forum, nearly 700 companies worldwide are currently participating in BCI research. The market is expected to reach $6.2 billion by 2030.
BCI gold rush
Much of the excitement comes from Neuralink, Elon Musk’s $9 billion brain implant venture that has sparked a race into space.
Neuralink is moving not only into medical applications but also into consumer applications. It aims to implant a device in a healthy person by 2030, Bloomberg reported earlier this year.
A new experiment is planned to read speech directly from the brain.
The company envisions directly interfacing with AI models “at the speed of thought.”
BCIs are no longer limited to stroke care or research laboratories. Gaming, mental health, neuromarketing and adaptive learning are now emerging use cases.
And India is starting to register on this global map with emerging startups and now Goyal’s Temple.
Also Read: Elon Musk’s Neuralink filed with FDA regulator, which oversees the division that oversees the startup
Why this moment is important
The convergence of longevity science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and personal tech hardware is collapsing previously separate industries. A tech billionaire getting into deeptech was once a curiosity. It’s almost expected today.
India is now aggressively moving into semiconductors, aerospace and biotechnology. The BCI and longevity markets are expanding rapidly.
And global interest in extending human life has evolved from dinner table discussions to geopolitical priority.
big question
It’s unclear whether these bets will yield anything close to era reversal or mind-machine communication.
But the ambition is clear: a future where living to 120 is normal, disease has been eliminated, and human cognition is seamlessly intertwined with machines.
This could take decades to come. But for tech founders like Goyal, Bezos, Altman and Thiel, decades are exactly the timelines they’re betting on.
