Better Auth
San Francisco company behind the open-source Better Auth TypeScript authentication library, founded by Ethiopian developer Bereket Engida. It raised a USD 5 million seed round in 2025 and was acquired by Vercel in July 2026.
Industry: Developer tools (authentication) | Location: San Francisco, United States | Founded: 2024 | Total Funding: USD 5M
About Better Auth
Better Auth, Inc. develops an open-source, framework-agnostic authentication and authorization library for TypeScript, released under the MIT licence, and offers enterprise features on top of it. Its legal page gives an address in San Francisco, California. Vercel announced on 7 July 2026 that it was acquiring the company.
Bereket Engida, a self-taught developer from Ethiopia, founded Better Auth. TechCrunch reported that he started programming at 18, built the first version over about six months in Ethiopia and posted it to GitHub in September 2024. The company joined Y Combinator's spring 2025 batch, and TechCrunch described it as the third Ethiopian startup in the programme.
The library handles email and password sign-in, sessions, email verification, password reset, social sign-on, and multi-tenancy with teams, roles and invitations. Its website lists more than 50 plugins, support for frameworks including Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Astro and Hono, and enterprise options such as single sign-on, SAML 2.0, SCIM provisioning and directory sync. Other products are an Infrastructure dashboard for self-hosted installations, an Enterprise offering and Sentinel, a threat-detection service. Forkast reported that version 1.5, released in February 2026, added MCP auth for the Model Context Protocol.
On 22 September 2025 the company announced that Auth.js, formerly NextAuth.js, would be maintained and overseen by the Better Auth team; Forkast describes this as an acquisition. The team has also been building Agent Auth Protocol, which gives each AI agent its own identity and scoped, revocable authority.
Better Auth announced a 5 million dollar seed round on 24 June 2025, led by Peak XV Partners with Y Combinator, P1 Ventures and Chapter One taking part. TechCrunch reported it as Peak XV's first direct investment in an African founder. Dealroom reported that financial terms of the Vercel acquisition were not disclosed.
Vercel said the library has more than 4.7 million weekly npm downloads and more than 850 contributors, and that it will stay free and open source under the MIT licence and keep its name. Engida and the core team are joining Vercel to continue work on Better Auth and agent identity.
Leadership
- Bereket Engida, Founder