Assa Abloy Guts Level Home, Founders Out, Staff Laid Off, Business Folded Into Kwikset

What Happened

Asса Abloy — the Swedish multinational that acquired Level Home in 2024 — has eliminated most of the company's staff and is transferring Level Home's assets to Kwikset, another Assa Abloy-owned smart lock brand. The restructuring was confirmed by both a source with direct knowledge of the layoffs and a statement from Assa Abloy itself, according to The Verge, which reported the story on June 26, 2026.

The source, who was among those laid off and spoke to The Verge on condition of anonymity, provided an audio recording of the internal meeting in which Peter Boriskin, CTO for Assa Abloy North America, and Kimberly Cummins, head of North American HR, told staff their positions were eliminated effective immediately as part of "a larger restructuring of the Level business."

Level co-founders John Martin (CEO) and Ken Goto (CTO) are both departing. Most of the engineering team is gone with them.

What Assa Abloy Says

Asса Abloy communications director Rebecca Samuel told The Verge in a written statement that Level Home "continues to operate as a business within ASSA ABLOY" and that the company "will continue to develop and sell the Level Lock platform and hardware." Samuel added that customer support and existing users will not be affected, and that the company remains "fully committed to providing the highest levels of support and continuing our investments in the smart lock category."

The source told The Verge that only a handful of employees are being kept on. Specifically, they will complete one upcoming product launch related to multi-family lock management. After that, it is unclear who actually builds or maintains the platform. A LinkedIn post from a former Level employee independently corroborated the layoffs.

The Level Product and Its User Base

Level Home built its name on a specific design proposition: hide the smart hardware inside the deadbolt itself, so the door looks like any normal lock from the outside. The approach won fans among homeowners who wanted smart lock functionality without the bulky exterior keypads typical of competitors.

The source estimates Level has hundreds of thousands of active users. These are people who bought into a product ecosystem that now has no founding engineering team and no confirmed replacement staff with comparable product knowledge.

Asса Abloy's most recent financial report shows declining sales in the North American residential segment. Assa Abloy confirmed the "recent restructuring" but has not shut the company down, per its own statement.

The Reasonable Concern for Existing Users

Smart locks are not standalone devices. They depend on apps, firmware updates, cloud connectivity, and ongoing software support. If Level's cloud services were ever discontinued, users could lose access to features such as the app, auto-unlock, and door status sensing. The source noted it is possible Assa Abloy could update the locks to remove their reliance on Level's servers, but said it would involve "a lot of complexity" the parent company may not want to deal with.

However, any Level lock that has been upgraded to Matter or added to Apple HomeKit would continue to support basic lock-and-unlock functions through those platforms, because those connections operate locally rather than through Level's cloud. And the locks will still work with a physical key.

When a company guts its engineering staff and absorbs the product into a different brand, that software pipeline is at genuine risk, regardless of what the PR statement says. The people who built Level's distinctive architecture are gone. Asса Abloy's assurances are the assurances of a company that just eliminated the team it's promising will keep working. That tension is real, and users are right to take it seriously.

What Assa Abloy's Statement Does and Does Not Say

Asса Abloy is a Sweden-based multinational that routinely acquires smaller brands and integrates them. The company's statement does not specify staffing levels post-restructuring, does not name who at Kwikset will own Level's codebase, and does not commit to a product roadmap timeline beyond the single pending multi-family launch.

None of that is proof of bad faith. Large acquirers absorb engineering teams into existing structures all the time, and the Level hardware itself — the physical lock — doesn't disappear. Kwikset has its own app and development infrastructure. An argument can be made that Level's platform survives under Kwikset's roof, even without Martin and Goto.

But "we will continue to develop and sell" is a commitment that currently rests on Assa Abloy's word alone, with no named engineers, no named product lead at Kwikset, and no public roadmap.

The Open Question

The most consequential unresolved issue is whether Kwikset's engineering team has the capacity and direction to maintain two distinct smart lock platforms simultaneously — its own and Level's — or whether Level devices will eventually be deprecated once the current installed base ages out. Assa Abloy has not addressed that question publicly. Until it does, the hundreds of thousands of Level users have no concrete answer.