Vercel acquires Ethiopian-founded Better Auth
Vercel has acquired Ethiopian-founded Better Auth for an undisclosed amount, bringing founder Bereket Engida and his team onboard to accelerate secure identity infrastructure for A
Vercel, a US software platform, has acquired an Ethiopian-founded cybersecurity startup, Better Auth, for an undisclosed sum. Founder Bereket Engida will join Vercel along with Better Auth’s core team, an announcement from Vercel revealed.
Engida, a self-taught developer, founded Better Auth in 2024 as an open-source authentication and authorisation framework. The startup’s success earned it a place in Y Combinator in 2025 and $5.5 million in seed funding from investors including Peak XV Partners and Africa-focused P1 Ventures. It also acquired Auth.js the same year.
The global AI agents market is predicted to expand to over $294 billion by 2035. Gartner projects that agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention by 2029. Engida described the acquisition as a natural next step as the pace of AI change made the challenge posed by AI agents impossible to ignore.
“Together, we will also be able to invest more deeply in where auth is heading: a future where agents act on users’ behalf and need secure, scoped, and revocable access while bringing these primitives across Vercel’s products,” he said in a blog post.
The Better Auth acquisition positions Vercel to pursue both an open-source auth mission and to build for the future, where securing agentic workflows in software will become crucial. Rather than pay high per-user fees to managed services like Clerk or Auth0, developers use Better Auth to get a premium, production-ready authentication system that runs entirely inside their own app.
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Vercel has already been at the forefront of agentic infrastructure, with recent launches such as Eve and Vercel Connect, along with higher-level tooling that makes auth easier for internal apps, including Vercel Passport.
“Through that work, it became clear Vercel was the best place to continue both our open-source auth mission and this new exploration. We are a small team; the agent identity problem is big and moving fast. With Vercel’s infrastructure, distribution, community, and product surface area, we can bring these ideas to developers at a much larger scale than we could alone — and without splitting our focus between maintaining the framework and building everything around it,” Engida added.
The acquisition gives Vercel a native, secure identity system for AI agents, as it can now bake the Agent Auth Protocol, Better Auth, and its latest product into its AI agent infrastructure.
