Better Auth: Ethiopian Developer’s Tool Gains $5M Investment

Better Auth, an innovative authentication tool developed by a self-taught Ethiopian developer, recently secured $5 million in funding. Peak XV Partners and Y Combinator (YC) co-led the investment, signaling strong confidence in the platform’s potential.

Investment Details

Better Auth Secures $5M Seed Round Led by Peak XV & YC 🚀

Better Auth raised a $5 million seed round, co-led by Peak XV Partners and Y Combinator. The round also included support from P1 Ventures, Chapter One, and key angel investors shega.co

Consequently, the funding will help Better Auth scale its authentication services and expand globally.

What This Funding Enables

• Robust infrastructure: The capital will support tools like SMS and email authentication, global session storage, and fraud protection techcrunch.com
• Team growth: Better Auth plans to hire and build faster while widening its talent pool .
• Enterprise layer: They aim to launch a paid add-on over their successful open-source framework linkedin.com

Why It Matters

First, this marks Peak XV’s first direct investment in an African founder—a major milestone for the continent’s tech ecosystem .

Second, it highlights rising global demand for strong authentication tools. Better Auth already powers AI startups and GitHub projects, and earns praise for being dev‑friendly and flexible .

Spotlight on the Founder

Founder Bereket Engida built Better Auth from Ethiopia. He started coding at age 18, launched the library in late 2024, and by June 2025, amassed 150K+ weekly downloads, 15K+ GitHub stars, and a 6K-member Discord community—all before moving to Silicon Valley finance.yahoo.com

Better Auth delivers streamlined authentication for web and mobile apps. It offers a clean, intuitive interface. It also provides strong security features for developers.

Why Developers Choose Better Auth

First, it supports email/password, social login (GitHub, Google, Discord, Twitter), two‑factor auth, and multi‑tenant systems—all with minimal setup reddit.combetterstack.com

In addition, it’s framework‑agnostic. Use it with React, Vue, Svelte, Next.js, Nuxt, Astro, Solid, Hono, and more .

Plus, it uses full TypeScript type safety. Developers get auto-generated schemas and a simple, type‑stable API .

Built-In Security You Can Trust

• Rate‑limiting, CSRF protection, and password policies come pre‑configured avishka.dev
• Two‑factor authentication and plugin-based multi-session support help secure accounts at scale .

Developer Praise & Community Feedback

According to Reddit, “Better–auth is fantastic…” and scales well with tens of thousands of daily users .

On Hacker News, users applaud the team’s fast response to security issues and flexibility:

“This library is so much more flexible… community leadership, responsiveness, and development speed has been incredible.” news.ycombinator.com

Real-World Usage

Developers report using Better Auth in production across dozens of apps—like SaaS UIs, internal dashboards, and AI tools—on frameworks like Next.js, Hono, Astro, Bun, SvelteKit, and more youtube.com