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Vercel, the US cloud platform behind Next.js, has acquired Ethiopian-founded Better Auth, the open-source authentication startup built by developer Bereket Engida. The deal brings Engida and his core team into Vercel to accelerate work on open-source authentication and to build out identity systems for AI agents.
Better Auth’s TypeScript authentication library has amassed more than 4.7 million weekly downloads on npm and draws contributions from over 850 developers. Vercel says the Better Auth library itself remains free and open source under its MIT license, keeping its name and the same community-driven development model.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch framed the deal as an extension of the company’s push for software that is “open by default, loosely coupled, and portable to any platform,” a philosophy already applied to Next.js, AI SDK and Nuxt. On Better Auth’s blog, Engida said Vercel had long been an inspiration for the project and that joining the company would give the Better Auth team more resources to keep building the framework the community relies on.
Engida’s journey to becoming a founder began three years ago while he was building an open-source web analytics tool and needed an authentication system with multi-tenant support, inviting teammates, assigning roles, and managing permissions. He couldn’t find an existing library that handled it well alongside NextAuth, so after weeks of frustrated workarounds, he decided to build his own framework-agnostic auth system from scratch.
According to TechCrunch, Engida taught himself to code at 18 and later built the entire first version of what became Better Auth from his bedroom in Ethiopia, publishing it to GitHub in September 2024. The library quickly gained traction, and by mid-2025 it had reportedly logged over 150,000 weekly downloads, more than 15,000 GitHub stars, and a Discord community exceeding 6,000 members.
Better Auth’s appeal was letting developers embed authentication directly into their own codebases and databases rather than handing user data to third-party services, a selling point for companies wary of external data storage, and one that also drew adoption from early-stage AI startups needing custom, secure token management.
In June 2025, the company announced raising $5 million in Seed funding from Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia), Y Combinator, P1 Ventures, and Chapter One, after Engida went through YC’s spring batch, becoming only the third Ethiopian startup to do so.
Peak XV partner Arnav Sahu said at the time that the firm had first heard about the product through startups it had backed, calling its adoption among AI-native companies “phenomenal”. The round marked Peak XV’s first direct investment in an African founder, per TechCrunch.
Under Vercel, Better Auth is expanding from conventional login systems into what both companies call “agent identity”. As AI agents increasingly act on users’ behalf, there is currently no clean way to limit what a given agent can do or to revoke just one agent’s access without cutting off others.
Engida’s team has already been developing the Agent Auth protocol to give each agent its own scoped, revocable identity, with the user retaining central control. Vercel says it will fold this work into its Connect and Eve products. Engida described this as a natural evolution of Better Auth’s mission, driven by the recognition that securing agentic workflows has become one of the most pressing challenges in software as AI adoption accelerates.
