Ethiopian Self-Taught Developer Raises $5M For His Authentication Tool, Backed By YC
Better Auth, an authentication tool, has raised $5 million in seed funding from Peak XV, Y Combinator, P1 Ventures, and Chapter One, according to TechCrunch. Bereket Engida, the self-taught programmer from Ethiopia and founder of the tool has built what some developers believe is that the best authentication tool to date.
Engida’s jounrey to building Better Auth
Engida told TechCrunch that he had built the entire product in Ethiopia before coming to the US. He started programming at 18 after a friend declined to help him create an e-commerce search app, so he began working on the project independently.
After landing a few remote software engineer jobs, he found that authentication was a continuous issue. Authentication tools handle user logins, password resets, and user permissions, but Engida found most were too limited, inflexible, costly at scale, and stored user data outside the company—a concern for many developers.
He stopped working on his project and started developing a TypeScript-based authentication framework that would allow developers to access user data via open-source libraries, supporting common permission use cases such as teams and roles.
He spent six months working from his bedroom in Ethiopia working on what would the initial version of that library that would become Better Auth. Since it’s creation, Better Auth has clocked 150,000+ weekly downloads, 15,000+ GitHub stars, and a community of over 6,000 Discord members, according to the startup.
An authentication tool loved by developers
Better Auth differs from other services as it has an open source library that allows developers to integrate directly into their codebase which keeps all user data in their database. The library has found a sudden appeal from early-stage AI startups, which often need to build custom authentication flows that work with proprietary APIs, manage tokens efficently and be able to expand without spending a signficant amount of money.
“We first heard about the product from numerous startups we’ve worked with,” said Arnav Sahu, partner at Peak XV and former principal at Y Combinator. “Their auth product has seen phenomenal adoption among the next generation of AI startups.”
Image: Better Auth
