In the heart of Addis Ababa, inside a modest bedroom without the glamour of Silicon Valley or the buzz of venture capital meetings, 24-year-old Bereket Engida was quietly crafting what many developers now call the best authentication tool they’ve ever used.
That tool — Better Auth — just raised $5 million in seed funding from global investors including Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India & Southeast Asia), Y Combinator, P1 Ventures, and Chapter One. But it’s not just the funding or the traction that makes this story remarkable. It’s how one young Ethiopian, without formal education in coding, built a world-class product that’s now powering startups across the globe.
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A Reluctant Beginning
Bereket’s journey into software started at 18 — not in a university lecture hall, but through frustration. A friend refused to help him build an e-commerce app, so he decided to learn programming himself. What began as a crash course quickly evolved into a career. He secured remote roles, experimented with products, and eventually built a user analytics tool.
But one problem kept resurfacing: authentication.
Every app — from AI-powered tools to your average SaaS — needs a way to let users log in, manage roles, and reset passwords. Solutions like Auth0, Firebase, and NextAuth existed, but they were rigid, expensive, and stored user data externally. For Bereket, that wasn’t good enough.
“I remember needing an organization feature,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s a very common use case for SaaS applications, but it wasn’t available from these providers. So I had to build it from scratch. It took me two weeks and I thought, ‘There has to be a better way.’”
Building Better Auth — Line by Line
Bereket scrapped everything and started fresh. He began developing a TypeScript-based open-source authentication framework that would give developers what they really needed: complete control over user data, plug-and-play role management, and lightning-fast deployment.
Working mostly from his bedroom, he launched the first version of the library in September 2024 on GitHub. Within weeks, developers around the world began taking notice.
By mid-2025, Better Auth boasted over 150,000 weekly downloads, 15,000 GitHub stars, and a community of 6,000+ developers on Discord.
Why Developers Are Flocking to It
Better Auth’s appeal is simple: it allows devs to integrate authentication directly into their backend without sending sensitive user data to third parties. For companies dealing with high-stakes compliance and data security, this is gold.
Even more, it offers enterprise-grade features out of the box — teams, permissions, role-based access — and can scale with the product. What would take weeks with other services can now be done in a few lines of code.
It’s also found an unexpected fanbase: AI startups, which need custom, secure authentication for proprietary tools and APIs. These young companies can’t afford to spend thousands on authentication, and Better Auth fits their exact needs.
“We first heard about the product from numerous startups we’ve worked with,” said Arnav Sahu, partner at Peak XV. “Their auth product has seen phenomenal adoption among the next generation of AI startups.”
A Win for Ethiopian Innovation
This $5 million round marks Peak XV’s first direct investment in an African founder — and it’s not hard to see why. In just a year, Better Auth has gone from a solo side project to a global developer favorite.
Bereket plans to stay close to his roots. While preparing a paid enterprise version and cloud-hosted options, he’s committed to the open-source spirit and the community that helped it grow. He still writes most of the code himself, but he’s now looking to build a small team to support growing demand.
Better Auth recently graduated from Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch — making it only the third Ethiopian startup to do so, after Avion (a drone-powered health logistics platform) and BeU Delivery.
But Bereket sees this as more than a startup win.
“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 others to dream bigger.”
A Global Product, Born in Ethiopia
Bereket Engida’s story is a powerful reminder that global innovation doesn’t have to come from Silicon Valley, London, or Beijing. Sometimes, it starts with one person, a laptop, and a problem they’re tired of solving the hard way.
Better Auth is not just a better authentication tool — it’s a symbol of what’s possible when talent, resilience, and vision meet, even thousands of miles away from the usual startup spotlight.
Source: TechCrunch
