Self-Taught Ethiopian Developer Raises $5M For ‘The Best Authentication Tool’ Better Auth 

Ethiopian startup Better Auth is being labeled the “best authentication tool” after its creator, Bereket Engida, raised roughly $5 million in seed funding from top investors, TechCrunch reports. 

Better Auth is an app providing an open-source framework, committed to simplifying how developers manage user authentication. Engida, a self-taught developer from the African nation, raised the hefty amount for his startup from Peak XV, formerly known as Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, Y Combinator, P1 Ventures, and Chapter One. 

The beauty behind Engida’s genius is that the app was created in Ethiopia before he set foot in the U.S. It all started at 18, when he began programming after a friend declined to assist him in building an e-commerce search app. However, after landing numerous software jobs and building a web analytics platform that enables developers to monitor website user behavior, he continued to notice that authentication was a problem. 

In the world of apps, each one has to be able to manage how users sign in and out of the system and reset passwords. After realizing that existing tools had extensive limitations or were too expensive to scale, allowing administrators to handle permissions and user roles, Engida took matters into his own hands. “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,” the developer said. 

“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.’”

Engida and Co-Founder Kinfe Michael Tariku believed from the start that developers should be able to own their authentication systems rather than being committed to expensive platforms. It’s one of the various reasons why investors are celebrating it. The Addis Ababa native started working on a TypeScript-based authentication framework, making it fool-proof for developers to build secure login, verification, and session management workflows without overthinking efforts, according to Addis Insight. 

Peak XV partner Arnav Sahu said the product is the “next generation of AI startups.” With their investment, Better Auth is the firm’s first direct investment from an African founder. “We first heard about the product from numerous startups we’ve worked with,” Sahu, who is a former principal at Y Combinator, said. 

“Their auth product has seen phenomenal adoption among the next generation of AI startups.” 

As a recent graduate of YC’s spring batch of startups, Engida is still thinking of ways to improve the free app. With Better Auth being the third Ethiopian startup to pass through the accelerator, the developer is focusing on ways to improve its core features and implement a paid enterprise infrastructure to plug into the open-source base. He also wants to scale the startup without getting rid of the community-built feel of the product. Building a team is also on the radar, as Engida is currently writing most of the code himself. “Building this feels important not just because people love the product, but because of what it represents,” he said. 

“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.”

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