Assa Abloy Guts Level Home Staff, Ousts Founders in Abrupt Restructuring
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A Sudden Shift in the Smart Lock Landscape
The stability of the smart home ecosystem often hinges on the corporate whims of parent companies, a reality now facing hundreds of thousands of Level Home users. Assa Abloy, the Swedish multinational lock giant, has reportedly gutted the staff of Level Home, the company celebrated for integrating smart technology into deadbolts that maintain a traditional aesthetic. The restructuring has seen the departure of the company’s founders, CEO John Martin and CTO Ken Goto, along with a significant portion of the engineering team.
The scale of the layoffs was revealed via an internal audio recording and corroborated by former employees on LinkedIn. In the recording, Peter Boriskin, CTO for Assa Abloy North America, and Kimberly Cummins, the head of North American HR, informed the staff that their roles were being eliminated effective immediately. While Assa Abloy characterizes the move as a “restructuring,” the loss of the core visionaries and the technical architects behind the product raises immediate questions about the long-term viability of the Level platform.
The Kwikset Connection and Corporate Friction
Internal sources suggest that Assa Abloy is folding Level Home’s assets into Kwikset, another brand under the Assa Abloy umbrella. This move appears to be a consolidation effort aimed at streamlining their smart lock portfolio in North America, where Assa Abloy’s recent financial reports indicate a slump in residential sales. By absorbing Level’s intellectual property into Kwikset, the parent company may be attempting to reduce overhead while maintaining a foothold in the high-end smart lock market.
However, Assa Abloy has attempted to downplay the integration. In a statement to the press, Rebecca Samuel, director of communications and branding for America, insisted that Level is not part of Kwikset and that the two brands remain separate. Despite these claims, the reported exodus of the engineering team suggests a pivot away from Level as a standalone innovation hub and toward a maintenance-mode operation.
What This Means for Current Hardware Owners
For the average homeowner, the primary concern is “cloud death.” Level locks rely on backend servers to manage features like auto-unlock, remote access, and door status sensing. If Assa Abloy were to discontinue these cloud services, the locks would effectively become “dumb” deadbolts, though they would still function with a physical key.
There is a silver lining for those who have integrated their locks into broader ecosystems. Because Matter and Apple HomeKit operate locally—meaning the command to lock or unlock happens within the home network rather than traveling to a remote server—these functions should remain intact even if Level’s proprietary cloud infrastructure falters. Transitioning the locks to a completely cloud-independent model would require significant engineering effort, a task that may be difficult given the recent loss of the primary engineering team.
Currently, a skeleton crew of employees is reportedly being retained for one specific purpose: completing a product launch targeted at multi-family lock management. This suggests that Assa Abloy’s priorities have shifted from the consumer residential market toward the more lucrative B2B apartment and complex management sector.
