It’s rare to see a solo founder building a widely adopted developer infrastructure tool. Even more so if the founder happens to be from Africa. Bereket Engida, a self-taught programmer from Ethiopia, is quietly building what some developers say is the best authentication tool they’ve ever used.
Engida’s startup, Better Auth, offers an open source framework that promises to simplify how developers manage user authentication, and it’s caught the attention of some big name investors. It recently raised about $5 million in seed funding from Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia), Y Combinator, P1 Ventures, and Chapter One.
But the most interesting part here isn’t who’s on the startup’s cap table: Engida says he built the entire product back home in Ethiopia before he set foot in the U.S.
Engida told TechCrunch that he started programming at 18 after a friend declined to help him build an e-commerce search app, and he started working on the project himself. He went on to land some remote software jobs and eventually built a web analytics platform that lets developers monitor user behavior on their websites.
But throughout his various jobs, Engida says he kept seeing an issue popping up everywhere: authentication. Every app needs to manage how users sign in and out and reset passwords, and sometimes administrators need to handle permissions and user roles. But he found existing tools were either too limited or too rigid — companies like Auth0, Firebase, and NextAuth offer managed services, but they store user data externally, limit customization, and are expensive at scale.
“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,” Engida told TechCrunch. “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.’”
He then scrapped that project and began working on a TypeScript-based authentication framework that would let developers access user data via open source libraries, support common permissions use cases — like teams and roles — out of the box, and scale with plug-ins.
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“The idea was that you could add advanced features in just two or three lines of code,” Engida said.
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