He Dropped Out to Build a Login Screen From His Bedroom in Addis Ababa. Vercel Just Bought It.

Most founders' origin stories have a moment of crisis. Bereket Engida's has two: a visa officer, and a login screen.

Engida, 25, is a computer science dropout. He taught himself to program at 18 in Addis Ababa, and years later, while building other products, kept running into the same wall over and over: every serious app needs authentication, and every option for building it — Auth0, Firebase, NextAuth — was either expensive at scale, locked user data into someone else's infrastructure, or simply didn't support features a real SaaS product needs on day one. "I remember needing an organization feature," he has said of the moment that pushed him to build his own. "There has to be a better way to solve this."

So he built one. Alone. Over roughly six months, mostly from his bedroom in Addis Ababa, Engida wrote Better Auth, an open-source authentication framework for TypeScript that developers could drop directly into their own codebase. The pitch was simplicity: "you could add advanced features in just two or three lines of code."

From a GitHub repo to Y Combinator — almost not

Better Auth went up on GitHub in September 2024. What happened next moved fast even by startup standards: within months, the project had 15,000+ GitHub stars and 150,000+ weekly downloads, with a 6,000-member Discord of developers who'd adopted it. That traction was enough to get Better Auth into Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch — only the third Ethiopian company ever accepted into the accelerator, after beU Delivery and Avion.

By the time Better Auth was heading toward Y Combinator, it wasn't a solo project anymore. Kinfe Michael Tariku, a third-year computer science student, withdrew from his own studies to join as co-founder — the same call Engida had made himself years earlier.

Then Engida's US visa application — for the trip to attend the YC interview in person — was denied, with less than a week left to travel and the next available embassy appointment not until September, months after the batch would already be underway. It was the kind of setback that ends a lot of founders' stories before they start. Better Auth made it into the batch anyway.

Peak XV's first bet on an African founder

Y Combinator backed the company with $500,000. Three months later, in June 2025, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia) led a $5 million seed round, joined by Y Combinator, P1 Ventures, and Chapter One. It was, notably, Peak XV's first-ever direct investment in an African founder — a firm known for backing category-defining developer tools choosing, for the first time, to back one built from a bedroom in Addis Ababa.

The growth since hasn't slowed. By mid-2026, weekly downloads had climbed from roughly 150,000 at the time of the seed round to 4.7 million, with more than 850 open-source contributors — the kind of trajectory investors describe in the same breath as the AI boom itself.

Vercel buys the company outright

Thirteen months after the seed round, on 7 July 2026, Vercel — the company behind Next.js, and the same platform Forbes.et itself runs on — acquired Better Auth outright. Financial terms weren't disclosed. Engida and his core team joined Vercel to keep leading development, now focused on "agent identity" — a protocol for giving each autonomous AI agent its own separate, revocable credentials, being built into Vercel Connect and eve, Vercel's platform for managing AI workflows. The library itself stays free and open-source under the MIT license, with community governance unchanged.

"Agent identity is foundational to agentic infrastructure," Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch wrote of the deal. The logic tracks: as software increasingly acts on a user's behalf without a human at the keyboard, someone still has to answer the question Better Auth was built to solve in the first place. Who is this, really, and what are they allowed to do.

Why it matters

Strip away the acquisition headline and what's left is a story about where the ceiling actually is. A 25-year-old dropped out, not because the work bored him but because he'd rather build the thing than study it — and built a piece of infrastructure that landed a seat inside Y Combinator, a first-of-its-kind bet from one of the industry's most selective venture firms, and an acquisition by one of the platforms every modern web developer already depends on. None of it required leaving Ethiopia to start. It required a laptop, a GitHub account, and a genuine irritation with how hard authentication was supposed to be.

Sources:

• TechCrunch — "Better Auth, an authentication tool by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC" (Tage Kene-Okafor, 2025-06-25)
• Dealroom.co — "Vercel acquires Better Auth, a year after Ethiopian founder's $5M seed"
• Vercel — official acquisition announcement
• Addis Insight — "From Ethiopia to Silicon Valley: Better Auth's Journey to Y Combinator Amid Visa Challenges"
• WeeTracker — seed round coverage and acquisition coverage
• Shega — "Ethiopia's 7-Month-Old Rising Star, Better Auth, Joins Y Combinator, Secures $500,000"
• Y Combinator — Better Auth company page
• GitHub — @Bekacru