Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC

At our company we use better auth for every product that has any kind of user account logic. It’s great since it’s drop-in, the plugins give so much functionality that you’d have to roll on your own in so little time and the integrations with ORMs like drizzle and prisma mean that your schemas stay the SSOT that they should be, even for auth. It’s extensible where it needs to be and brings defaults that are more than sane. Also the RPC-like TypeScript client that you also get for free is so good I don’t know how I could live without that.

Glazing over, I just wanted to give props and say that whatever good happens to better-auth, it deserves it.

Related:

Launch HN: Better Auth (YC X25) – Authentication Framework for TypeScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44030492 - May 2025 (106 comments)

Better Auth – Authentication library for TypeScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42272707 - Nov 2024 (32 comments)

Show HN: Comprehensive authentication library for TypeScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678652 - Sept 2024 (44 comments)

supertokens did the same thing from bengaluru. didn’t start loud. just showed up with clean abstractions that didn’t leak. you could tell someone had wrestled with real auth mess before touching a single line. it worked, across teams, stacks, workflows

better auth gives off the same shape. that gets well adopted because it survives scaling without needing a rewrite

same pattern and diff origin place. someone holding the whole stack in their head long enough to ship something

So pumped for Bereket. Better Auth is awesome.

I am also interested on how they plan to monetise it. I love the library and the success story but hope that the weight of this VC money doesn’t impact its awesomeness

This is Arnav Sahu from PeakXV. I used to work at YC. Really excited for them and Bereket, the founder. He is an outlier founder.

Why does a JavaScript auth library have to raise five million?

Will this be monetized with the classic SSO enterprise subscription play? Would be nice if they are transparent on how they plan to make money.

The DX is quite nice, even though not well suited for existing projects as it is hard to migrate existing users. There is no easy way to keep existing sessions or do a legacy login, then migrate a user to the new better-auth supplied hashing function.

For folks that are using better-auth: are you using anything to build your frontend with? Or just writing it from scratch? I was interested in trying this out but was kinda surprised to find this is just an sdk with no components.

I found this https://better-auth-ui.com/

I remember how basically better auth got a huge lead because lucia was shutdown by its dev for their own reasons which I admittedly have forgotten but they made sense and the community had accepted it.

But those who hadn't started using better auth more. And now I guess its crazy how I felt as if this would be just a small project like lucia in the sense of its just created for the passion and the art, but now it has raised 5 mill$ , I wonder if the community wanted this to be an artisanal like project like lucia before its end or what the community thinks of this move. Since VC and open source have some inherent compromises with each other and I guess I just wanted to write this to hear more about people who are using better auth in prod and what they think of what this VC funding.

This is awesome! I literally gave better-auth a spin 2 days ago and I was able to get it up and running within 15 minutes. I'm yet to try the plugins, but looks really easy to set up and work with, safe to say I'll be using it for future projects.

I didn't like the fact that it doesn't have a built-in sign-in ui components, but glady https://github.com/daveyplate/better-auth-ui solves it.

This is a nice set of tools. Very useful.

I hope they will also develop a self-hosted standalone service/node which hosts accounts and can support JWTs which I could verify on my own servers so the BetterAuth node would issue JWTs signed with a secret key I provided as an ENV var, then I could verify the JWTs on my own servers. This would be a neat decoupling. Could be offered as a SaaS service as well.

I'm also keeping tabs on https://github.com/stack-auth/stack-auth

Why does the article’s title state the country of origin of the developer? Does it matter? Is it a surprise that there are smart, business savvy developers across the globe?

Congrats, very good library. I wonder what's going to be the business model though, since the library main difference is that it's not a cloud service

Curious how this compares to something like Ory Kratos? And what would the projected revenue stream be?

Better Auth is brilliant! My only criticism is that it's too tightly coupled with Kysely.

If i get it correctly, it solves the problem, to store data on MVP/Prototype Auth providers like Superbase, Auth0 or Firebase.

How does it compare to something mature like keycloak?

And what is the difference to just self-host superbase?

Can anyone compare Better Auth with something more barebones like Lucia?

helllll ya!

one of the best libraries in the ecosystem. it's basically open-source Clerk without the baggage of needing to trust someone else's security story

"Better Auth’s pitch is simple: Let developers implement everything from simple authentication flows to enterprise-grade systems directly on their databases and embed it all on the back end."

Its absolutely bonkers to me that web development has gotten to a point where this is a novel pitch. Up until not that long ago ALL auth was done directly in your own database and embeded in your own backend. Am I missing something?

Aren’t we all self taught? I’m not sure why that part of the story is relevant. In over 15 years of this business, I’ve directly been on a team with probably 5-10 total people with a comp-sci degree — and that includes my time at Apple. Mark Zuckerberg was self-taught.

cant wait.. i guess on the 27th they are dropping support for SAML

Glad to hear Peak XV getting it's moment on a competitor's forum. Jokes aside, congrats Bereket.

Love this news! Amazing by Bereket!

Also weary now of the monetisation strategy, as this probably means that enterprise SSO will be locked behind a massive paywall?

yet another jswt solution for no good reason other than js based "backends" can't really handle requests properly.

What’s the monetisation strategy here? Raising 5M for what exactly?

Pretty sure auth is not something I want a self-taught dev (or even most CS-graduate devs) writing.

Oauth2, JWT's, hashes, timestamps, validations, and such, are all totally simple until they're not. The black hats have way more experience and way more time invested in this space than most any normal dev.

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Wonderfully racist! How is it relevant in any way that the dev is ethiopian? I couldn't care less. I care about the product or service.

I'm not sold on Better Auth.

Recently I wanted to add auth to my pet project, and between (a) using better-auth, then integrating 3rd party mailer service, and rolling out my main dashboard (b) leeching off free tier of Auth0 or Clerk and getting all batteries included I've chose the latter.

The fact that better-auth doesn't come with barebone dashboard is criminal.

For pet project it doesn't matter if I have to integrate Resend or Clerk, it's still some mental overhead I have to account for, but with Clerk at least I don't have to manage my users using sql queries.

People say it's better because you can embed it in your app. I don't buy that either. If I'd have to rollout better-auth I'd do that as a separate app, just to encapsulate database, dashboard, and integrations.

Anyway, glad it's getting traction, I just don't get all the hype around it.