Bereket Engida is a self-taught programmer from Ethiopia. Frustrated by the high costs, inflexibility, and external data storage of existing authentication services like Auth0 and Firebase, he spent six months building an open-source framework from his bedroom in Addis Ababa.
In September 2024, Bereket open-sourced the project on GitHub, and it quickly went viral in the developer community. It became one of the most popular and rapidly adopted developer infrastructure tools in the JavaScript ecosystem. YC and Funding Following its massive grassroots adoption, the project caught the eye of major investors.
Better Auth secured $5 million in seed funding from top investors, including Y Combinator (where he participated in a cohort), Peak XV, P1 Ventures, and Chapter One. Today, the framework is heavily used across AI startups, major OSS projects, and is the recommended authentication library for top JS frameworks.
