The glucose monitor spent decades doing one thing, and doing it well: helping people with diabetes manage their condition. Now it's attempting something far stranger. Walk into a Walmart and you'll find Abbott's Lingo sitting on the shelf beside fitness trackers and multivitamins, available to anyone willing to stick a sensor on their arm and curious enough to wonder what their body does with a breakfast burrito. No prescription. No diagnosis. Just $99 and a willingness to quantify another aspect of your existence.
It's a peculiar transformation—one that's turning a $20 billion diabetes technology market into something messier and harder to define. Call it a wellness gold rush, perhaps.
Behind those tidy retail displays and polished app interfaces sits a more complicated story, one that involves regulatory gambles, corporate land grabs, and a cohort of startups that have been building the connective tissue between hardware and habit change for years. The FDA cracked open the door in 2024, clearing a new category of over-the-counter continuous glucose monitors for adults not using insulin. Dexcom and Abbott both sprinted through within months, launching Stelo and Lingo in rapid succession. But the real fight isn't just about sensors anymore—it's about who gets to own "metabolic health," a term that means everything and nothing depending on who's pitching it.
When the Giants Go Shopping for Consumers
Dexcom moved first, characteristically. On August 26, 2024, the company made Stelo available without a prescription, targeting adults 18 and older who have Type 2 diabetes or prediabetes but don't use insulin. The pricing felt deliberate: $99 for two 15-day sensors, or $89 monthly on subscription. It was Dexcom's attempt to expand beyond its core insulin-dependent user base, a market it has dominated for years with prescription devices like the G6 and G7.
Abbott took a different route—perhaps a riskier one. After securing FDA clearance for Lingo on June 10, 2024, the company positioned it squarely as a consumer biowearable for "people looking to improve their overall health." Broader language than Dexcom's clinical framing, intentionally so. In October 2025, Abbott announced a major retail push, rolling Lingo into Walmart locations nationwide, a retail distribution advantage Dexcom couldn't replicate. The company doubled down that December, extending a marketing campaign featuring Serena Williams aimed squarely at health-conscious, non-diabetic consumers—the Peloton-and-Oura crowd.
The contrast is instructive. Dexcom is leveraging decades of medical credibility, positioning Stelo as a gateway for people with metabolic conditions who don't yet need insulin. Abbott is chasing the wellness market, betting that millions of people without diabetes want real-time feedback on how food affects their blood sugar. Both strategies rest on the same assumption, though neither company can yet prove it at scale.
The Middlemen Building Meaning
Hardware, of course, is only half the equation. CGMs spit out glucose readings every few minutes, but raw numbers mean little without interpretation. That gap is where the startups have been building.
Levels, probably the most visible player in this space, has been at it since 2019. Co-founded by Sam Corcos, Josh Clemente, and a team that includes Dr. Casey Means, the company pairs CGM data with a scoring system and behavioral nudges it calls "metabolic fitness." By mid-2025, Levels had expanded well beyond glucose tracking—adding optional blood testing, AI-powered insights, and dietitian access. The company raised a $38 million Series A in April 2022, plus a $7 million extension in January 2023. Andreessen Horowitz had led an earlier seed round, establishing early venture backing for the metabolic health category.
Nutrisense took a different angle: human coaching at scale. Founded by Alex Skryl, Dan Zavorotny, and nutrition lead Kara Collier, the platform pairs CGM data with registered dietitians for personalized guidance. The company raised a $25 million Series A in July 2022. Third-party trackers suggest revenue of around $40.5 million in 2023 and $60.2 million in 2024, though those figures—aggregated from external databases—should be taken as directional rather than gospel.
Signos, led by CEO Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, positioned itself as a weight-management tool from the outset. The platform combines Dexcom CGM data with an AI engine delivering real-time recommendations. In May 2023, the company began supporting people with Type 2 diabetes alongside its non-diabetic users. Signos raised $13 million in a Series A in November 2021 and a $20 million Series B in October 2023, led by Cheyenne Ventures and GV. More recently, according to the company's help documentation, Signos has been planning a migration from Dexcom's prescription G7 sensor to the OTC Stelo—a shift that could streamline onboarding for new users, assuming the integration goes smoothly.
Then there's January AI, which took a notably different approach. Founded by Noosheen Hashemi and Stanford's Dr. Michael Snyder, the company built a predictive model that estimates post-meal glucose responses to more than 30 million foods. The twist? It works without a CGM. Users can optionally add a sensor for precision, but January AI's core proposition is forecasting, not monitoring. In October 2024, the company announced a collaboration with Mars, Inc., using its prediction engine to inform product formulation. It's an early signal that metabolic insights might eventually flow upstream to food manufacturers, not just downstream to anxious consumers.
New Hardware, Different Bets
While Dexcom and Abbott compete for shelf space, a third player has been quietly advancing a different form factor. Biolinq's Shine, a needle-free intradermal glucose sensor, received FDA De Novo classification on September 23, 2025. The device promises five days of autonomous time-in-range monitoring without the traditional subcutaneous needle insertion—a design that could ease one of the biggest psychological barriers to CGM adoption. U.S. availability is expected sometime in 2026, though no formal launch date has been announced. Biolinq raised a $100 million Series C in April 2025, a substantial bet on a form factor that might, or might not, resonate.
The De Novo pathway itself matters more than it might seem. By establishing a new regulatory category, the FDA has created a clearer route for future devices that blend medical utility with consumer wellness applications. Whether that accelerates meaningful innovation or just invites a flood of undifferentiated "biowearables" remains to be seen.
Who's Not Making It
Not everyone is surviving the transition. Supersapiens, an athlete-focused CGM app that partnered with Abbott's Libre Sense sensor, ceased memberships and product shipments in March 2024 amid restructuring. The company had targeted endurance athletes—a niche that proved too narrow to sustain independent operations, even with a compelling use case.
More revealing was Oura's acquisition of Veri in September 2024. Veri, a Finnish startup that had raised roughly €11.5 million, offered a CGM-enabled app for personalized metabolic health. Oura, known for its sleep-tracking ring, announced it would fold Veri's team—all three co-founders included—into its own operations and discontinue the Veri brand by year's end. The message was clear: metabolic data might best live inside larger ecosystems, not as standalone businesses.
Ultrahuman, another metabolic-wearable player, offers a CGM program tied to its smart ring. But the company hit legal headwinds in the U.S.: an October 2025 ITC ruling barred Ultrahuman from importing or selling smart rings following a patent dispute with Oura. Existing U.S. customers could keep using their devices, but new sales stopped cold. According to a March 2024 interview, roughly 20 percent of Ultrahuman ring users had also purchased a CGM—a modest crossover, but suggestive of appetite for multi-modal metabolic tracking.
The Skeptics Have Entered the Chat
For all the momentum, the category has its doubters—and they're not all cranks. A 2023 Wired feature raised concerns that non-diabetic users might misinterpret normal glucose spikes, leading to anxiety or unnecessary dietary restrictions. A 2025 study from the University of Bath added technical nuance, noting that CGMs can overestimate glycemia in some postprandial tests among healthy participants. The devices, after all, were never designed for people with normal glucose regulation. The clinical utility of tracking "normal" blood sugar remains an open—and largely unanswered—question.
ZOE, the personalized nutrition company co-founded by epidemiologist Tim Spector, has used CGM as part of its PREDICT research studies and consumer testing programs. A November 2025 update on the company's website described how CGM fits within a broader metabolic profiling approach that includes gut microbiome and blood lipid testing. It's a useful reminder that glucose, while accessible and continuous, is one data stream among many. It might not even be the most predictive for long-term metabolic health.
The FDA's OTC clearances technically sidestep these debates by targeting specific populations: people with Type 2 diabetes not using insulin, or those with prediabetes. But in practice, anyone 18 or older can buy a Stelo or Lingo. The line between medical device and wellness gadget has blurred past recognition, and it's unclear whether regulators, payers, or the market itself will ultimately redraw it.
What Happens Next (Maybe)
The immediate future looks crowded, and probably unsustainable in its current form. Dexcom is banking on Stelo as a bridge product, pulling non-insulin users into its ecosystem before they progress to more intensive diabetes management. Abbott is betting on mass retail and celebrity endorsements to normalize CGMs as lifestyle devices. Startups like Levels and Nutrisense are racing to build sticky software layers before the hardware giants decide to verticalize and cut them out entirely. Biolinq, if it delivers on its needle-free promise, could reset user expectations overnight.
Underneath it all is a question that hasn't been answered, or even properly asked: what, exactly, is metabolic health? The phrase has become a catch-all for everything from weight management to longevity optimization, but the science remains frustratingly murky. Glucose tracking offers a feedback loop, a way to close the gap between food choices and physiological response. Whether that loop translates into meaningful behavior change—or just generates more data exhaust for people to ignore—is something the market will have to work out on its own.
For now, the battle is less about proving clinical outcomes and more about territory acquisition. The companies staking claims today will shape how millions of people think about metabolism tomorrow. And if the past two years are any guide, the winners won't just be the ones with the best sensors. They'll be the ones who make glucose data feel indispensable—or at least harder to ignore than your step count.
