SALTO Brand Guidelines: The Basque Lock Maker That Put Access Rights on the Card

A start-up in northern Spain, 2000.

SALTO began in 2000 as a start-up in northern Spain. The trade magazine Euro Security, in a history published in January 2026, says the founding idea was a completely wireless, battery-powered electronic door lock — one of the first stand-alone electronic locks that did not need a traditional key — at a time when access control was still largely a matter of mechanical keys and hard-wired systems. An EY Spain press release of December 2024 gives the same founding year and places the company in Gipuzkoa, in the Basque Country.

The same EY release names Javier Roquero as a co-founder of SALTO and its chief executive from 2000 to 2024, and reports that he won EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year award for Spain’s northern region in 2024. Euro Security reports that he stepped back from day-to-day management after 23 years, joined the board and became involved with the newly founded SALTO Foundation, which supports social projects with a focus on sport and inclusion. In April 2024 Marc Gómez took over as group chief executive.

The legal name on the company’s website today is Salto Systems, S.L. In running text the company now usually writes its name Salto, while the group name is set in capitals as SALTO WECOSYSTEM. The website says the business has more than 1,850 staff, over 350 of them engineers, and more than 40 offices.

Data on the card, then on the phone.

SALTO’s product story is a sequence of ways to manage doors without running cables to them. According to Euro Security, the next step after the first stand-alone lock came in 2002 with the SALTO Virtual Network, or SVN. It uses data-on-card technology: access rights are stored on contactless RFID smart cards and updated each time a card is presented at a reader, so doors are networked virtually rather than by wire.

SALTO Wireless followed in 2008, linking battery-powered locks by radio to central software so that access could be managed in real time, again without cabling to each door. In 2014 came Clay by Salto, later renamed Salto KS, a cloud service for managing access rights without a local server, which Euro Security says suited offices and co-working spaces in particular. In 2015 the company introduced JustIN Mobile, which lets people open doors with a smartphone, an approach the magazine says spread quickly in hotels and offices.

Design is part of how the company presents those products. Euro Security notes that from the 2010s SALTO put more weight on industrial design and user experience, offering electronic fittings and readers in sleeker, contemporary shapes and a range of colours and finishes so that they would sit more easily in hotel rooms and homes; the magazine links that to the wider acceptance of electronic locks in hotels and housing. Its website also has a page it calls MyLock that invites visitors to customise a smart door lock.

Hotels, offices, universities and residential buildings are the settings the company and the trade press return to most often. The SALTO website says its systems run at more than 10 million access points in over 100,000 projects, and it describes itself as one of the top three makers of electronic locks worldwide — a company claim rather than an independent ranking.

Doors, cards and phones.

Access control is a quiet kind of design. Most people meet it as a small reader beside an office door, a keypad at a side entrance or a plastic card on a lanyard, and only notice it when the light turns from red to green. The makers in this guide build those readers, the cards and phone credentials that talk to them, the controllers and software behind them, and, increasingly, the cameras and video systems that sit alongside.

Much of the industry’s imagery comes from the building rather than the product. Pictures on company websites and in trade catalogues often show lobbies and turnstiles, staff badges clipped to belts, a phone held up to a door as a key, a guard desk facing a wall of video screens, and rows of server racks where the software runs. Some brands sell mainly through installers and integrators, so their pictures are aimed as much at the person fitting the door as at the person walking through it.

The trade meets at a few large fairs. ISC West in Las Vegas is where HID Global was introduced to the security industry in April 2006, according to the formation announcement reprinted by SecurityInfoWatch; Security Essen, held in the German city of Essen, is another fixture of the calendar. Trade titles such as Security Today and Benchmark report on product launches, new factories and the industry’s own awards.

Ownership in the sector ranges from family firms to divisions of large lock and technology groups, and several brands have changed hands more than once. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From one lock to a group of three brands.

Growth came through new offices and then acquisitions. Euro Security reports that SALTO opened its first offices abroad in the 2000s, had its own branches in more than 30 countries by 2020 and in almost 50 by the mid-2020s. It bought the Dutch start-up Clay and the Danish smart-lock maker Danalock in 2017 and Conlan in 2019. The largest step, the magazine says, was the purchase in 2020 of the Austrian company Gantner Electronic, a specialist in electronic access, cashless payment, locker systems and ticketing; the same year Vintia was formed out of Gantner’s ticketing business.

In 2024 the three businesses were brought under one umbrella brand, SALTO WECOSYSTEM: access control under Salto, identification and payment under Gantner, and ticketing and visitor management under Vintia. Euro Security describes the change as both a brand and a structural reorganisation, with group-wide teams for sales, innovation, service and cyber security.

SALTO is privately owned and has outside investors. In July 2026 the Basque news site Onda Vasca reported that Indar Kartera, the investment vehicle of the bank Kutxabank, had taken a majority of an Alantra Private Equity co-investment vehicle that holds a stake in the company, after SALTO completed a restructuring of its shareholders; Alantra Private Equity remains a shareholder through that vehicle. The same report, citing Kutxabank, says SALTO has production plants in Oiartzun, in Gipuzkoa, and in Nüziders, in Austria, and that most of its suppliers are local.

For a design guide, SALTO shows how a hardware maker can build an identity around an idea — the keyless, cable-free door — and then carry it from metal fittings to cards, phones and cloud software. Compare it with the Swedish lock group in our ASSA ABLOY guide and the Swiss-German maker in our dormakaba guide. For this guide we use a harbour slate, night ink, brushed steel and a rust accent with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SALTO’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.