Dexcom Brand Guidelines: San Diego 1999, the G-Series Sensors & Stelo

Five founders and one job: continuous glucose monitoring.

Dexcom was founded in San Diego in 1999. English Wikipedia names five founders: Scott Glenn, John Burd, Lauren Otsuki, Ellen Preston and Bret Megargel. The company has done one thing from the start: continuous glucose monitoring, or CGM. Wikipedia describes each Dexcom system as a thin wire sensor placed under the skin, where it measures glucose in the surrounding fluid, and a transmitter that sends the readings wirelessly to a receiver, a phone or another device.

The first product took several years. Dexcom went public in 2005 and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker DXCM. In 2006 it received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the STS, a three-day sensor, Wikipedia says. Before that, according to Wikipedia’s article on the device line, the company’s research had concentrated on a fully implantable sensor meant to work for between a month and a year. The Seven followed in May 2007, extending wear to seven days, and the Seven Plus was approved in February 2009 and gained a CE mark that November.

The G-series began with the G4 Platinum, which gained a CE mark and FDA approval in 2012 and came with a colour screen and a choice of colours for its receiver. Share, approved in January 2015, let readings be passed to up to five other people through the Share and Follow phone apps. The G5, approved in August 2015, put Bluetooth into the transmitter so that a phone could take the place of the separate receiver, and the G6 followed in 2018. Wikipedia calls the G6 the first CGM cleared to connect directly to compatible insulin pumps and the first to work without routine fingerstick calibration. On 20 April 2020 Dexcom joined the Nasdaq-100 index, Wikipedia records.

From a receiver in the pocket to a patch and a phone.

The G7 changed the object itself. Wikipedia says it was the first Dexcom CGM to combine sensor and transmitter in a single piece, and the first that could connect directly to an Apple Watch without a phone in between. It was released first in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Hong Kong in October 2022, cleared by the FDA in December 2022 and launched in the United States in February 2023, promoted with a Super Bowl advertisement featuring the singer Nick Jonas. A longer-wearing version, the G7 15 Day, followed.

The newest line is Stelo. On 5 March 2024 the FDA announced that it had cleared the Stelo Glucose Biosensor System as the first over-the-counter CGM, for adults who do not use insulin, with each sensor worn for up to 15 days and readings shown in a phone app every 15 minutes. Wikipedia says Dexcom began selling Stelo in the summer of 2024 and that Time named it among the year’s best inventions in October 2024. On 12 June 2026 the FDA extended the clearance to people aged two and over who do not use insulin, calling Stelo the first over-the-counter CGM for children.

Much of Dexcom’s story is about connection to other companies’ devices. A non-exclusive agreement with Tandem Diabetes Care in 2015 led to Tandem’s Control-IQ technology, approved in December 2019 for use with the t:slim X2 pump and the G6, Wikipedia says. In February 2020 Dexcom and Insulet signed a non-exclusive global agreement to combine Dexcom sensors with Insulet’s tubeless Pod.

Other partners followed. In 2015 Dexcom began working with Google Life Sciences, later renamed Verily, on the development of the G7; in 2019 it agreed a data exchange with Companion Medical, maker of the InPen; and in November 2024 it announced a data partnership with the ring maker Oura, according to Wikipedia. Dexcom Ventures, launched in early 2021, invests in new sensing technologies.

Wearables, phone graphs and congresses.

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.

San Diego headquarters, plants in three countries.

Dexcom remains an independent listed company, with its global headquarters and research centre in San Diego. Its manufacturing sites, according to English Wikipedia citing the company’s 2025 annual report, are in Mesa, Arizona; Batu Kawan, Malaysia; and Athenry, County Galway, Ireland.

In March 2025 the FDA published a warning letter to Dexcom dated 4 March, following inspections at San Diego in October and November 2024 and at Mesa in June 2024. The agency said the methods and controls used to make the G6 and G7 sensors did not conform to its quality-system rules, and that a change to a component in the sensors’ resistance layer had been made without the required premarket notification. MedTech Dive reported on 26 March 2025 that Dexcom had stopped distributing G7 sensors with that component. The next day it reported a company spokesperson saying that no design changes had been made, that Dexcom had qualified a second source for a raw material and had notified the FDA through 510(k) submissions, and that the company was committed to resolving the agency’s concerns.

For a design guide, Dexcom shows how a medical brand can be carried by a small object worn on the skin and a line of readings on a phone or watch screen. Compare Insulet, whose Omnipod works with Dexcom sensors, and Abbott, maker of the FreeStyle Libre sensors. For this guide we use a deep green, a pale mint and a teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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