The story begins not in a boardroom but on a mountain road in the Sierra Nevada. John Martin, his family packed into the car, arrives at the Lake Tahoe vacation house only to realize the keys are back in San Francisco. Forty-five minutes of standing in the cold waiting for a locksmith. Most people would rant about it and move on. Martin started sketching a company.
That night at the door gave Level Home its founding premise: the problem with smart locks wasn't that they were too dumb - it was that they were too obvious. Every product on the market, at the time, announced itself with a keypad, a motor housing, a plastic facade. The logic was backward. Martin and co-founder Ken Goto, both veterans of Apple, decided to solve it properly - by making the lock invisible.
"When we looked at first generation smart locks, we were offended by how aggressively the experience was departing from how people use locks today."
- John Martin, Level Home Founder & CEOLevel Lock, their debut product launched in October 2019, fits entirely inside the existing deadbolt cylinder. No new hardware on the outside of the door. No keypad. No bulk. The same key still works. The same deadbolt knob still turns. From the street, from the hallway, from across your living room - nothing looks different. The lock just happens to also respond to Bluetooth, NFC, Apple Home Key, Google Home, and Alexa. You wouldn't know unless you installed it.
That idea - that the best version of a technology is the one you can't see - is the through line of everything Martin has done at Level Home.
The Résumé That Made The Lock
John Martin's path to building the world's first invisible smart lock runs through some of the most consequential technology programs of the last three decades. He started his career at NASA, managing internet infrastructure for scientific computing at a time when the internet was a research tool, not a consumer product. Then came an eleven-year run at Microsoft, working on Windows NT and Windows Media - early infrastructure for the digital home, in retrospect.
From Microsoft, he moved to Loudeye as SVP of Product, then to Starbucks as VP of Digital Music - this was 2003, when music streaming was barely a concept and Starbucks was experimenting with in-store digital music experiences that predated Spotify by years. The move from Starbucks to Apple in 2005 was the shift that shaped everything that followed.
At Apple, Martin served as Vice President of the Apps Division, working inside the company during the period that produced the iPhone and its platform. He absorbed a particular design philosophy - that the user's experience matters more than the specification sheet, that constraints produce better products than open-ended toolkits, and that mainstream adoption requires a kind of respectful restraint that early adopters rarely demand. After Apple came Nokia, where he led the NSeries devices business, before founding a private startup and then ultimately landing on Level Home as his main act.
"The majority of the company is from Apple at some point of their careers."
- John MartinWhen he co-founded Level Home in 2016 with Goto, Martin assembled a team built substantially from Apple alumni - engineers and designers who shared the same instinct about what technology should feel like: invisible, effortful, and earned. "We start at square zero," he has said, describing the company's design approach, "so we can strike the perfect balance between today's cutting edge technology and the practicality of our everyday living experience."
Day One: Walmart Writes a Check
Most hardware startups spend years trying to convince a major retailer to take them seriously. Level Home had Walmart committed before the product shipped. When the company emerged from stealth in October 2019 - alongside the unveiling of the Level Lock - it announced $71 million in funding with Walmart and Lennar (one of the US's largest homebuilders) as lead investors. That is not a typical Series A.
The Walmart investment was strategic and logistical: a distribution partner with reach into tens of millions of American homes, betting that an invisible smart lock would resonate with mainstream buyers rather than the tech-early-adopter segment that first-gen smart home products had courted and largely lost. Martin had spent enough time inside consumer technology to know where that segment ends - and to aim past it.
The Square Zero Method
Level Home's internal design principle, which Martin calls "Square Zero," is worth pausing on because it explains something counterintuitive about the company. In an industry obsessed with features, Level consistently makes fewer visible promises. The Lock doesn't have a screen. It doesn't need its own app ecosystem. It doesn't require changing anything about how you use your door.
"Why would we take the things away that matter, that are a part of who you are such as the look of your home, just in the name of tech?"
- John Martin, Level HomeThis isn't minimalism for aesthetic's sake. It's a production bet: that the addressable market for a lock that doesn't disrupt your life is vastly larger than the market for a lock that requires you to adopt a new routine. The BHA AAA-rated, weather-resistant deadbolt works with existing door hardware, installs with basic tools, and supports every major smart home ecosystem out of the box. The friction of adoption is deliberately near zero.
By 2021, the strategy had earned a second major vote of confidence. Level Home closed a $100 million-plus Series C led by Cox Communications, with Walmart participating again. Total capital raised reached $171 million. In the same announcement, Martin revealed the acquisition of Dwelo, a SaaS platform for smart device management in multifamily residential properties - apartment buildings, built-to-rent communities. The deal gave Level Home vertical coverage from single-family consumer homes to large property-management portfolios.
From Startup to ASSA ABLOY: The Exit That Made Sense
In September 2024, ASSA ABLOY - a 200-year-old Swedish company and the world's largest lock manufacturer - acquired Level Lock's hardware business, intellectual property, and brand. Martin and Goto moved to ASSA ABLOY to continue leading the Level Lock business. The multifamily SaaS platform was separately spun out as Ambient Property Technologies under a new CEO.
For Martin, the acquisition wasn't a conclusion - it was the logical distribution play. Level Lock, inside the world's dominant lock company, reaches distribution channels that no startup funding round could match. The invisible lock, built by a team of Apple veterans in Redwood City, is now backed by the infrastructure of a company that puts hardware in billions of doors around the world.
"To be transformative you have to offer a complete experience that integrates both hardware and a disruptive software and services platform."
- John Martin, on Level's strategy post-Series CMartin's arc - from NASA in the late 1980s to the world's most invisible smart lock in the 2020s - reads like a case study in patience. He spent decades inside major organizations before building his own. He took an idea that originated in a parking lot in the Sierra Nevada, refined it over three years before launch, resisted the temptation to clutter the product with features, and exited to a company positioned to take it global.
The lock you can't see is now inside one of the oldest lock companies on earth. The founder who refused to call himself a startup guy ends up proving that the best hardware founders are the ones who think like that.