What's Happening to Level Lock's Smart Door Lock After ASSA ABLOY's Acquisition

ASSA ABLOY, a large lock and hardware company, has laid off staff at Level Lock, a smart lock startup it bought in September 2024. Level Lock is now being absorbed into ASSA ABLOY's Kwikset brand, a familiar name in home hardware.

Level Lock was known for one specific thing: a smart deadbolt that installs hidden inside your door, so the outside looks like a regular lock. It works with Apple Home Key (the feature on iPhones and Apple Watches that lets you unlock a door) and connects via Bluetooth. Many people liked it because they could have a smart lock without the bulky box visible on the outside of their door.

ASSA ABLOY owns several lock and hardware brands in North America, including Kwikset, Baldwin, and Weiser. In 2021, the company bought the hardware division of Spectrum Brands, which gave it access to store shelves and online retailers everywhere. Level Lock, being a smaller startup, didn't have that kind of distribution power — that's why ASSA ABLOY wanted it.

ASSA ABLOY is now in the middle of a big cost-cutting program. The company is closing 10 factories, shutting 16 offices and warehouses, and converting 27 facilities. The goal is to save money and streamline operations within roughly two years. Moving Level Lock's engineering team and cloud systems (the online services that keep the lock working remotely) under Kwikset fits this plan. Running Level Lock as a separate brand — with its own app, its own team updating the software, and its own process for Apple certification — costs more money than combining everything under Kwikset.

What we don't know yet is whether Level Lock will still exist as its own product, get renamed as a Kwikset model, or disappear entirely. The layoffs suggest it won't stay independent much longer.

Here's what matters for people who own Level Lock: the company moved very fast. ASSA ABLOY finished buying Level Lock in September 2024 and started cutting jobs within nine months. That's quick for a company integrating a product that requires ongoing software updates and that people depend on to open their doors. If the company's backend systems (the cloud infrastructure) get reorganized before customers can move to a new system smoothly, existing owners could lose remote access or stop getting updates.

This pattern has happened before in the smart home world. Companies buy promising startups for their good ideas and talented staff, then run them so lean that they lose what made customers loyal in the first place. The question now is whether ASSA ABLOY can keep Level Lock working well while saving the money it needs to save.

For anyone buying a smart lock going forward, this raises an important point: the company behind it matters as much as the product itself. Apple Home Key certification and other technical standards are table stakes, but someone has to maintain those systems and push out updates. ASSA ABLOY is big and stable enough to do that — the question is whether it will.