Ethiopia’s 7-Month-Old Rising Star, Better Auth, Joins Y Combinator, Secures $500,000

Better Auth, a 7-month-old open-source authentication framework for TypeScript, has been selected for Y Combinator's Spring 2025 Cohort, securing $500,000 in seed funding.

By joining Y Combinator, a highly influential global startup accelerator with over 4,000 companies in its portfolio valued at over $600 billion, Better Auth becomes the third Ethiopian company to enter YC, following beU Delivery and Avion. The accelerator, which receives over 10,000 applications per batch, has an acceptance rate of just 1%.

Developed by Bereket Engida and Kinfemichael Tariku, an early 20 duo who'd traded college classrooms for coding, the tool aims to simplify a critical, yet often complex, part of developer infrastructure.  

Within mere months of the launch of Better Auth, the project has drawn 10,000 GitHub stars, 644 forks, and 274 contributors, and has been downloaded over half a million times signaling rapid community buy-in.  

“The project's popularity on GitHub, with over 10,000 stars and numerous forks, indicates a strong level of interest and adoption,” Bereket told Shega. "It means tens of thousands of the developer community across the world are showing their support," he added. 

GitHub stars represent the number of users that have favorited or bookmarked the project, showing strong interest. Meanwhile, forks refers to the number of developers who have copied the project to modify or build upon it.

Authentication framework refers to a set of tools, libraries, and protocols that help developers implement secure user authentication in applications. Better Auth distinguishes itself as framework-agnostic, offering flexibility to developers using various TypeScript-based technologies. Its core objective is to deliver a comprehensive authentication suite, incorporating multi-factor, social, and multi-tenant capabilities, thereby reducing coding overhead. 

Several popular open-source projects have adopted Better Auth for their authentication needs, including Follow, a content organization tool with 23k stars; Dokploy, a self-hosted application deployment platform boasting 17.5k stars; Shiro, a personal media server project with 3.7k stars; Cloudflare Saas Stack, a starter kit for building SaaS products on Cloudflare with 3.4k stars; and Mail0, an open-source AI email solution currently in development with 3.2k stars, according the co-creator, Bereket. 

Y Combinator, known for backing successful ventures such as GitLab, Mattermost, Amplitude, and Font Awesome, is betting on Better Auth's potential. A drive perhaps fueled by TypeScript's surging popularity, now powering 38% of web projects (up from 12% in 2017) and projected to increase even more, particularly in large-scale applications. 

TypeScript is a programming language developed by Microsoft that extends JavaScript by adding static typing. It allows developers to define variable types, making it easier to catch errors early and improve code maintainability.

The three-month program is set to begin early next month; the Addis Ababa-based Better Auth is currently facing a different challenge as the pair has been denied a visa from the US embassy in Ethiopia. Though they’re hoping the support letter from YC will solve their problem, a social media outcry has brought to light the inherent visa challenges faced by Africans, sparking conversation over the past week.

African nationals have increasingly become more prone to high visa rejection rates in recent years. Last year, a story by Semafor revealed that the EU is set to earn millions of euros more from the high rejection rates of Schengen visa applications submitted by African visitors, following a new 12.5% increase in non-refundable fees that took effect in June 2024.  Of the €130 million the EU earned in 2023 from rejected visa applications, around 42% came from applicants residing in Africa.