Tandem Diabetes Care Brand Guidelines: The San Diego Maker of the Touchscreen t:slim Pump

A San Diego start-up that asked users first.

Tandem Diabetes Care began in San Diego in 2006. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s 2013 prospectus filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, says it was incorporated in January that year as Phluid, Inc. and took the name Tandem Diabetes Care in 2008. Kim Blickenstaff, a former executive of the diagnostics company Biosite, joined as president and chief executive in 2007, the same year, the company later said, that work began on its first pump.

That pump took five years to reach patients. The San Diego Union-Tribune reported in November 2011 that the still privately owned company would launch its first commercial product, a compact insulin pump called the t:slim, in the first half of 2012, after the Food and Drug Administration had cleared it. The paper said Tandem was counting on the pump’s easy-to-use touch screen, its small size and its “iPhone-like design” to stand out in a crowded field. Blickenstaff told the paper that the company had spoken with more than 4,000 health-care professionals and people with diabetes, and that the clear message was to “make it cool and make it uncomplicated to use.” At the time Tandem had about 90 employees, most of them at its Sorrento Valley facility in San Diego.

The design brief was unusual for its category. Wikipedia notes that the t:slim used a colour touchscreen rather than the button-based interfaces then common on insulin pumps, and that it was shaped by interviews with pump users and clinicians. The pump went on sale in the United States in 2012.

Tandem became a public company on the Nasdaq in November 2013. John Sheridan, previously its chief operating officer, succeeded Blickenstaff as president and chief executive in March 2019, according to a company announcement cited by Wikipedia.

t:slim, Control-IQ and Mobi.

The first t:slim grew into a family. Wikipedia lists earlier models called the t:flex and the t:slim G4, the latter approved by the FDA in 2015 to show readings from a Dexcom G4 Platinum sensor on the pump. In 2016 Tandem began shipping the t:slim X2, a rechargeable touchscreen pump with a 300-unit cartridge that can take software updates without new hardware. In February 2019, Wikipedia records, citing the FDA’s classification order, the agency classified the t:slim X2 as the first “alternate controller enabled” insulin pump, a category meant to let devices from different makers work together.

Software became the centre of the product. Tandem introduced Basal-IQ in 2018, a feature that used predicted sensor values to pause insulin delivery. Control-IQ, a hybrid closed-loop system that adjusts basal insulin from continuous glucose monitor readings, was authorised by the FDA in December 2019 and released in the United States in January 2020 as an update for compatible t:slim X2 pumps. A revised version, Control-IQ+, was cleared in 2025 for adults with type 2 diabetes who use insulin, Wikipedia says, citing FDA records.

The second pump is much smaller. The Tandem Mobi holds a 200-unit cartridge, is run mainly from a smartphone app and has one physical button. The FDA cleared it in 2023 and Tandem began its full US launch in 2024. In a July 2024 interview with MedTech Dive, the company’s chief medical officer, Jordan Pinsker, framed the pump around how it is worn: “It’s not tubed versus tubeless. It’s wearability.” He said the pump could be clipped on, carried in a pocket or disconnected, and that Tandem was working on a patch-pump option. According to Wikipedia, Mobi received a CE mark in 2025 and began reaching European markets.

Acquisitions filled out the range. Tandem bought the diabetes-data app Sugarmate in June 2020, the infusion-set developer Capillary Biomedical in July 2022 and the Swiss patch-pump developer AMF Medical in January 2023; AMF’s rechargeable Sigi pump was still in development at the end of 2025, Wikipedia says, citing the company’s annual report. Its data software includes the t:connect app and the Tandem Source web platform.

Design and documentation.

Diabetes device makers sell small things that people wear, carry or use many times a day: continuous glucose monitors worn on the upper arm or the belly, insulin pumps and tubeless patch pumps, blood-glucose meters with their test strips, and the pen needles and syringes used for injections. Their brand worlds are built around those objects, and increasingly around the data the objects produce.

A typical presentation pairs a close-up of a sensor or pump on skin with a phone screen showing a glucose graph and trend arrows. Apps and watch faces have become as central as the hardware: sensor makers describe readings sent wirelessly to phones, shared with family members and passed to insulin pumps, and that connection between devices is often the story the brand tells.

Photography in the category tends to be bright and active, with runners, swimmers, parents and children, while meter-and-strip brands lean on clean packshots of the meter, the strip pot and the lancing device. Regulation shapes the words as much as the pictures: product names come with indications, approval dates and age ranges, and marketing copy stays within what regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have cleared.

The industry meets at medical congresses such as the American Diabetes Association’s Scientific Sessions, the annual meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) and the ATTD conference on advanced technologies and treatments for diabetes, where new devices and study results are presented to clinicians. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its products are made and what regulators have said — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A lower-case “t:” and “positively different.”

Tandem’s naming is consistent. Its products share a lower-case “t:” prefix — t:slim, t:flex, t:connect — while the newer pump and platform take the company name itself, as Tandem Mobi and Tandem Source. On its website the company describes itself as “a positively different diabetes care company” and uses “Positively Different” as a sign-off; those are its own words. It names Dexcom, Abbott and Unomedical, a ConvaTec company that supplies infusion sets, among its partners.

The company remains independent and listed, with its headquarters in San Diego. Wikipedia, citing its annual report for 2025, says it had an in-warranty user base of nearly 500,000 people in more than 25 countries at the end of that year.

Like other pump makers, Tandem has issued corrections that the FDA classified as recalls. Wikipedia, citing FDA records, lists a 2014 recall of selected t:slim cartridge lots, a 2024 correction of version 2.7 of the iOS t:connect app, and corrections in 2025 to Control-IQ+ software, to a group of t:slim X2 pumps and to a group of Mobi pumps; in each case the company issued updated software or instructions to users.

For a design guide, Tandem Diabetes Care shows how a medical device can be pitched on its interface: a pump sold in 2011 on its touch screen and phone-like looks, and later on how it is worn. Compare Dexcom, whose sensors its pumps have worked with, and Medtronic, another insulin-pump maker. For this guide we use a harbour navy, a deep teal and a screen white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tandem Diabetes Care’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.