Better Auth: Ethiopian solo dev's open-source auth library raises $5M from Peak XV, YC

Better Auth is an open-source TypeScript authentication framework built by Bereket Engida, a self-taught programmer from Ethiopia. Unlike hosted services such as Auth0, Firebase or NextAuth, it is a library developers embed on the back end, so user data stays in their own database; orgs, teams, roles and advanced features are meant to be added in two or three lines of code, scaling through plug-ins.

Engida's bet was that the managed-auth model itself was wrong for a large share of developers: existing tools stored user data externally, limited customization and grew expensive at scale, and every SaaS app still had to re-build common cases like organizations and permissions. When he needed an org feature no provider offered, he built it in two weeks, then spent six months in his bedroom in Ethiopia writing the framework that would become Better Auth, posting it to GitHub in September 2024.

The bet looked right in practice: by mid-2025 Better Auth claimed 150,000+ weekly downloads, 15,000+ GitHub stars and 6,000+ Discord members, with early AI startups adopting it for custom authentication flows around proprietary APIs. It graduated YC's spring 2025 batch and raised about $5M in seed funding from Peak XV, Y Combinator, P1 Ventures and Chapter One — Peak XV's first direct investment in an African founder.

As of the 2025-06-25 TechCrunch report the core was free; the roadmap was a paid enterprise infrastructure layered on the open-source base, optional cloud add-ons for those who did not want to self-host, and a small team for maintenance, documentation and enterprise support. Engida was still writing most of the code himself.