The future of smart lock specialist Level has been thrown into uncertainty after reports emerged that its parent company, Assa Abloy, has reportedly laid off most of the brand’s staff and folded the business into its Kwikset brand.
According to a report from The Verge, the restructuring has resulted in the departure of Level’s founders, CEO John Martin and CTO Ken Goto, along with the majority of the engineering team that helped build the company’s distinctive range of smart locks.
The Verge reports that it obtained an audio recording of an internal meeting where employees were informed that their roles had been eliminated immediately as part of “a larger restructuring of the Level business.” A former employee also publicly confirmed the layoffs on LinkedIn.
Level was acquired by Sweden-based lock giant Assa Abloy in 2024, adding another premium smart home brand to a portfolio that already included Kwikset and Yale.
According to The Verge’s source, Level’s assets are now being transferred into Kwikset, leaving only a small number of employees behind to complete an upcoming product focused on multi-family lock management.
That naturally raises questions about what happens next for one of the smart home industry’s most respected lock brands.
Speaking to The Verge anonymously, the source claimed that Assa Abloy is not well positioned to maintain the customer experience for what they described as hundreds of thousands of active users.
Assa Abloy insists that Level isn’t going anywhere. “It continues to operate as a business within Assa Abloy, and we will continue to develop and sell the Level Lock platform and hardware,” Rebecca Samuel, director of communications and branding, told The Verge.
One area that will inevitably be watched closely is Level’s cloud platform. Many of the premium features on Level locks, including the companion app, auto-unlock and door status detection, rely on the company’s cloud infrastructure.
It’s difficult not to feel a little disappointed by this news. Level earned a reputation by doing something genuinely different in the smart lock market. Instead of building bulky gadgets, it hid the technology almost entirely inside a standard-looking deadbolt.
That elegant engineering helped it stand out in an increasingly crowded category, and most of its locks have reviewed exceptionally well over the years.
Hopefully this restructuring doesn’t signal the end of what made Level special.