MiniMed Group Inc. is back as a locally based publicly traded company, having come full circle after 30 years.

The Northridge-based insulin pump maker held an initial public offering on March 6, months after it was spun off from its longtime corporate parent company, the Galway, Ireland-based medical products giant Medtronic.

Last week, MiniMed held a ceremony at its Northridge headquarters reintroducing itself as a locally based company.

MiniMed employs about 1,500 at the headquarters and roughly 8,000 globally. The company reported $2.72 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending in April 2025. As of last week, it had a market cap on the Nasdaq exchange of about $4.5 billion.

“MiniMed is once again a standalone public company,” Que Dallara, now MiniMed’s chief executive, said during the company celebration marking the occasion last week. The company is “really built around one central mission, and that is to make every day a better day for people with diabetes.”

MiniMed’s spinout and IPO were welcomed by local biomedical industry leaders.

“Having a multibillion-dollar medical device company in Los Angeles is key for the industry,” said Dan Gober, executive director of the Los Angeles region for Biocom, a San Diego-based nonprofit that advocates for the state’s biomedical and bioscience industries.

“So often, we hear about companies leaving Los Angeles,” Gober said. “But here we have a decision to plant the flag where the company was birthed, and it is a big boost.”

The circle begins

MiniMed was founded in 1983 by the late serial biomedical entrepreneur Alfred Mann to commercialize the concept of an insulin pump.

From the time that insulin was discovered in 1922 as a treatment for regulating blood sugar levels in diabetic patients until MiniMed’s insulin pump came onto the market, the only method for insulin delivery was repeated injections through the skin. That required constant testing of blood sugar levels through small blood draws and then injecting the right amount of insulin several times each day.

MiniMed’s insulin pump automated much of this process, continuously monitoring blood glucose levels and delivering a constant flow of insulin.

Once the insulin pump gained traction in the diabetes treatment field, MiniMed’s sales started growing, reaching $36 million in 1994. The following year, Mann took the company public, and sales subsequently shot up to nearly $300 million by 2000.

Part of the Medtronic empire

Medtronic, then based in Minneapolis, bought MiniMed for $3.7 billion in 2001. MiniMed was renamed Medtronic Diabetes, though the headquarters of the new division remained in Northridge. Over the next 20-plus years, Medtronic Diabetes continually improved the MiniMed insulin pump, adding more features, integrating it with smartphone technology and bolstering sales through Medtronic’s extensive distribution network.

By 2024, sales of Medtronic Diabetes reached $2.49 billion. Almost all of that growth was direct-to-consumer.

Two years prior, Medtronic hired Dallara as operating president of the diabetes division. She had previously served as chief executive of the Connected Enterprise division of Charlotte, North Carolina-based Honeywell International Inc.

Then last May, Medtronic announced it would spin off its diabetes division into a separate company that would in turn go public, preferably through an IPO. Dallara would be the new company’s chief executive.

“This marks a significant milestone in driving both Medtronic and the diabetes business to achieve lasting value for Medtronic, our shareholders, customers, and patients,” Geoff Martha, chairman and chief executive of Medtronic, said in the announcement. “Active portfolio management is an important lever to delivering on our ongoing growth and success, and this decision shifts the Medtronic portfolio to have intense focus on our highest margin growth drivers where we have our strongest core competencies.”

The spinoff and IPO

Shortly after that announcement came word that the newly spun-off entity would revert to its original name, MiniMed.

This naming choice was much to the liking of Robert Greenberg, chief executive of Santa Clarita-based huMannity Medtec, formerly the Alfred E. Mann Foundation. (Mann died in 2016 at age 90.) Greenberg also is board chair of the Southern California Biomedical Council – better known as SoCalBio – a Westwood-based industry trade group.

“Al (Mann) would have really liked the idea of bringing the original MiniMed name back,” Greenberg said. “It does hearken back to the entrepreneurial spirit and rapid growth of the original company.”

Late last month, MiniMed launched its IPO road show and issued its prospectus. The company’s announcement gave a target share price of between $25 and $28, which with 28 million shares being offered would have raised between $700 million and $780 million before fees and expenses.

The IPO took place March 5 and 6, but the initial pricing came in below the initial target, at $20 a share. That was due to what Reuters termed difficult market conditions; just days earlier, the United States and Israel attacked Iran, triggering a broad market selloff. As a result, the raise was only $560 million.

According to the IPO road show announcement, Medtronic was to hold just over 90% of MiniMed shares at the conclusion of the IPO.

According to the prospectus for the IPO, Medtronic Diabetes’ revenue for the fiscal year ending in April of last year was $2.72 billion. However, between research and development costs and operating losses, the pro-forma earnings statement showed a net loss of $250 million.

Also, according to the prospectus, new chief executive Dallara’s total compensation for 2025 was listed as $8.45 million, including a $758,000 base salary and $6.5 million in stock awards and options. The document also states that upon completion of the IPO, Dallara’s base salary would rise to $980,000 and total compensation to $10.12 million, in recognition of her increased leadership role and “responsibilities in connection with running a public company.”

Upgraded insulin pump released

Right out of the gate as an independent public company, MiniMed announced March 18 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved a new version of its signature insulin pump, called MiniMed Flex.

According to the company’s release, this new version is about half the size of the previous insulin pump and is more completely integrated with smartphone technology.

“At MiniMed, our mission is to make every day a better day for people with diabetes,” Dallara said in the announcement. “MiniMed Flex embodies that promise,” she added. “It’s designed to work quietly and reliably in the background – advanced automation wrapped in a compact, smartphone-controlled pump. The result is technology that lets people spend less time managing diabetes and more time living their lives.”

The new version also makes greater use of artificial intelligence algorithms to adapt more quickly to changes in glucose levels.

“This level of automation, paired with the freedom of smartphone control, has the potential to improve consistency, confidence, and ultimately clinical outcomes for a broad range of patients with diabetes,” Anders Carlson, medical director of the International Diabetes Center at Park Nicollet Clinics in Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, and assistant professor in the University of Minnesota Medical School, said.

More such innovations are in store at MiniMed. In her remarks last week, Dallara said the company is starting clinical trials for what she termed “our next generation algorithm.”

Both industry leaders Gober and Greenberg said it is this type of innovation trajectory that will provide a crucial boost to the region’s biomedical industry.

“Hopefully being separated from a large company like Medtronic will create more of an entrepreneurial ethos, allowing MiniMed to move more quickly,” Greenberg said.