Better Auth, an authentication tool by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC

It’s rare to see a solo founder building a widely adopted developer infrastructure tool. Even more so if the founder happens to be from Africa. Bereket Engida, a self-taught programmer from Ethiopia, is quietly building what some developers say is the best authentication tool they’ve ever used.

Engida’s startup, Better Auth, offers an open source framework that promises to simplify how developers manage user authentication, and it’s caught the attention of some big name investors. It recently raised about $5 million in seed funding from Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia), Y Combinator, P1 Ventures, and Chapter One. 

But the most interesting part here isn’t who’s on the startup’s cap table: Engida says he built the entire product back home in Ethiopia before he set foot in the U.S.

Engida told TechCrunch that he started programming at 18 after a friend declined to help him build an e-commerce search app, and he started working on the project himself. He went on to land some remote software jobs and eventually built a web analytics platform that lets developers monitor user behavior on their websites.

But throughout his various jobs, Engida says he kept seeing an issue popping up everywhere: authentication. Every app needs to manage how users sign in and out and reset passwords, and sometimes administrators need to handle permissions and user roles. But he found existing tools were either too limited or too rigid — companies like Auth0, Firebase, and NextAuth offer managed services, but they store user data externally, limit customization, and are expensive at scale.

“I remember needing an organization feature. It’s a very common use case for most SaaS applications, but it wasn’t available from these providers,” Engida told TechCrunch. “So I had to build it from scratch. It took me about two weeks, and I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy; there has to be a better way to solve this.’”

He then scrapped that project and began working on a TypeScript-based authentication framework that would let developers access user data via open source libraries, support common permissions use cases — like teams and roles — out of the box, and scale with plug-ins.

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“The idea was that you could add advanced features in just two or three lines of code,” Engida said.

Why developers love it

Over six months working mostly from his bedroom in Ethiopia, Engida built the first version of the library that would go on to become Better Auth. When he posted it to GitHub in September 2024, developers quickly saw the potential. 

Since then, Better Auth has clocked 150,000+ weekly downloads, 15,000+ GitHub stars, and a community of over 6,000 Discord members, the startup claims. 

Better Auth’s pitch is simple: Let developers implement everything from simple authentication flows to enterprise-grade systems directly on their databases and embed it all on the back end. Unlike hosted services, Better Auth is an open source library that developers can integrate directly into their codebase, keeping all user data on premise, in their database. For companies wary of handing over critical user information to third parties, this feature alone is a major point.

The library has also found unexpected traction among early-stage AI startups, which need to build custom authentication flows that integrate with proprietary APIs, manage tokens securely, and be able to scale without racking up high costs.

“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.”

Better Auth marks Peak XV’s first direct investment in an African founder.

Engida says Better Auth, currently free to use, will focus on improving its core features and launch a paid enterprise infrastructure that plugs into its open source base. This will give developers the flexibility to self-host or opt for Better Auth’s cloud add-ons as needed.

He’s also thinking about how to scale without trading away the product’s community-built feel. On the roadmap, therefore, is hiring a small team to help maintain the codebase, expand documentation, and support enterprise users. For now, though, Engida is still writing most of the code himself.

Better Auth, which just graduated from YC’s recent spring batch, is the third Ethiopian startup to pass through the accelerator, following drone-based digital health platform Avion, and food delivery platform BeU Delivery. 

“Building this feels important not just because people love the product, but because of what it represents,” said Engida. “There aren’t many Ethiopian founders building global products. For many, it feels almost impossible. So seeing that traction gives hope for other people to try to be more ambitious.”