In the startup ecosystem, building a successful company used to be the finish line but for India’s most successful founders, it has started to look more like the warm-up. The entrepreneurs who rewired how India eats, shops, travels, and takes care of its health are now turning their attention to harder, stranger, and arguably more consequential problems. Brain health, regional aviation, the creator economy, next-gen consumer brands, and the systemic gaps that no one has had the nerve, or the capital, to tackle head-on.
Here are five new ventures from India’s most established founders that are worth your attention.
1. Temple, Deepinder Goyal
When Deepinder Goyal founded Zomato, he addressed a widely experienced yet under-defined problem, enabling users to discover and order food seamlessly across India. What began as a simple menu digitisation platform has since evolved into a publicly listed, multi-vertical business of significant scale and value.
What does the man who did that decide to do next? He goes after the human brain.
Temple, which came out of stealth in early 2026, is built on what Goyal calls the Gravity Ageing Hypothesis, the belief that posture and restricted blood flow to the brain are among the most overlooked drivers of cognitive decline. Temple is a wearable headband that uses Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) to monitor cerebral blood flow and oxygenation in real-time. No consumer device in the world currently tracks this at scale. If Temple pulls it off, it won’t just be a product. It will be a new health category. The startup operates under Goyal’s research entity Continue, which he set up in late 2025 with a $25 million personal commitment to longevity science. Temple raised $54 million in a friends-and-family round at a post-money valuation of approximately $190 million. The early target market is elite athletes and high-performance professionals, but the long game is making brain monitoring as routine as checking your pulse.
2. Un:Bloc, Deepak Sahni
In 2015, Deepak Sahni started Healthians with a straightforward idea. He wanted to add 10 healthy years to every Indian’s life and make healthcare more affordable and accessible to everyone. What followed was a decade of grinding execution, expansion to over 250 cities, and 22 labs built from scratch, scaling Healthians to a valuation of over ₹3,000 crore. It is one of the most significant healthcare infrastructure stories in Indian startup history.
Now, Sahni has stepped away from all formal executive responsibilities and announced the launch of his much-anticipated new startup- Un:bloc, his most ambitious venture. Currently, it is in its pre-launch phase, though the details are not yet disclosed, however, Un:Bloc is positioned as an ambitious attempt to solve large-scale systemic challenges, potentially within healthcare, but extending well beyond diagnostics.
Sahni has also committed ₹100 crore over three years to back India’s next wave of founders, and he has already invested in brands like Handpickd, Beanly, Repill, Indian Sneaker Fest (ISF), Fiona Diamonds, and Gignaati AI. For a founder who built from nothing, the focus on early-stage founders who have the right idea but need early validation feels less like a strategy and more like a personal conviction.
3. OFF/BEAT Studios, Aman Gupta
Aman Gupta did something that most thought was near-impossible, he made audio hardware aspirational in India. boAt turned earphones and speakers from utility purchases into identity statements, building a ₹3,000+ crore consumer electronics brand on the back of sharp marketing, celebrity associations, and an intuitive read of what young India wants to buy and be seen buying.
After transitioning to a non-executive role at boAt, Gupta launched OFF/BEAT Studios in March 2026, and the market responded immediately. The venture secured ₹100 crore in seed funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners before announcing a single product.
Gupta has described it as a studio that sits at the intersection of AI, the creator economy, and identity-first consumer brands, ventures built not around what people need, but around who they want to be. If boAt was about making quality products accessible, OFF/BEAT appears to be about building the cultural icons of the next decade. Specific launches are still under wraps, but the funding round alone tells you the appetite.
4. LAT Aerospace, Deepinder Goyal
Deepinder Goyal co-founded LAT Aerospace in 2025 alongside Surobhi Das, a former Zomato executive. The startup is developing autonomous, hybrid-electric Short Take-Off and Landing (STOL) aircraft designed to fly in and out of compact air-stops, unlike traditional airports.
India has hundreds of towns and cities that will never get a full-scale airport. LAT is betting that they don’t need one. The vision is high-frequency, affordable regional air travel built on lean infrastructure, connecting the India that road and rail still struggle to reach. The company has committed $50 million to the venture.
In early 2026, LAT significantly expanded its scope by acquiring Sharang Shakti, a defense-tech startup specialising in anti-drone robotics and aerial surveillance. That acquisition signals something important: this isn’t a civilian mobility play alone. The dual-use ambition, commercial aviation meets indigenous defense tech, makes LAT one of the more strategically layered bets in the Indian startup ecosystem right now.
5. The Foundery, Nikhil Kamath
What do you get when you put Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath, who disrupted Indian stock broking with zero-commission trading and built a company touching crores of investors, in the room with Kishore Biyani, the man who invented organised retail in India before the rest of the country even knew what a shopping mall was?
You get The Foundery. Launched in late 2025, it is best described as a co-founder factory, a 90-day residential programme designed to do what most accelerators claim to do but rarely pull off. Actually build companies from scratch, with the right people, around high-conviction ideas.
The Foundery provides selected entrepreneurs with an Idea Bank of pre-researched concepts in beauty, fashion, and health, the sectors where Kamath and Biyani have decades of hard-won pattern recognition between them. Every selected co-founder receives up to ₹4 crore in capital and a 25% equity stake. There is also a School of Life track built into the programme, covering philosophy, art, and mental resilience alongside the business-building curriculum. The mentor board includes Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Kunal Bahl.
The underlying thesis is a pointed one- most consumer brands don’t fail because of bad products or insufficient funding. They fail because the founder wasn’t built for the complexity of what they were attempting.
