Vercel, a US software platform, has acquired Better Auth, the company behind the popular open-source TypeScript authentication library, in a move that deepens its investment in developer infrastructure and AI-native applications.
As part of the acquisition, Better Auth founder Bereket Engida and the company’s core team will join Vercel. They will continue leading the development of Better Auth while expanding work on agent identity, a technology designed to manage AI agents operating on behalf of users securely.
Engida described the acquisition as a natural next step, given the pace of AI change, which made the challenge posed by AI agents impossible to ignore.
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Better Auth’s library is widely adopted across the developer ecosystem, recording more than 4.7 million weekly npm downloads and contributions from over 850 developers.
The acquisition aligns with Vercel’s broader vision of building software that is open by default, portable across platforms, and loosely coupled.
The company said Better Auth extends that philosophy to authentication by providing a framework-agnostic solution that developers can fully own and deploy anywhere.
A major focus of the acquisition is Agent Auth, a system that enables each AI agent to have its own identity with scoped and revocable permissions.
Rather than allowing every AI agent to inherit a user’s full access, the approach gives individual agents limited privileges while keeping users in complete control over authorization.
Vercel believes agent identity will become a foundational component of future AI infrastructure and plans to integrate the technology into Vercel Connect and eve.
Despite the acquisition, Better Auth will remain free and open source under the MIT license. The project will retain its name, while the existing team continues to oversee development through its current community-driven governance model and maintain compatibility across multiple frameworks.
Founded in 2015, with its headquarters in San Francisco, California, Vercel is the platform where humans and AI agents build, ship, and scale software together. The company is trusted by tech giants including OpenAI, Meta, Ramp, and Supreme.
On its platform, it has introduced support for persistent WebSocket connections across all Vercel runtimes, enabling developers to build real-time backends using Node.js, Python, or Go.
The platform supports standard WebSocket libraries such as Socket.IO, allowing applications to deliver seamless real-time communication.
The feature runs on Vercel’s Fluid compute with Active CPU pricing, meaning customers are billed only for the time spent processing messages rather than for periods when WebSocket connections remain idle.
This pricing model is designed to make real-time applications more cost-efficient while supporting long-lived connections.
The recent acquisition of Better Auth comes as Vercel expands its enterprise and backend capabilities. In June this year, the company launched Vercel Services in public beta, allowing developers to run multiple frameworks within a single Vercel project.
The platform introduces atomic deployments that keep frontend and backend services synchronized, shared preview deployments for testing changes across services, and secure internal communication between services without exposing traffic to the public internet.
Vercel Services also provides developers with managed infrastructure for compute, networking, data storage, background processing, and secure external integrations, enabling teams to build APIs, AI agents, and backend services from a unified platform.
Also last month, Vercel introduced Vercel for Enterprise Apps and Agents, a platform designed to help organizations develop and deploy AI-powered applications securely within their existing access controls and security boundaries.
The acquisition of Better Auth underscores Vercel’s strategy of combining open-source developer tools with enterprise-grade infrastructure as demand grows for secure authentication and identity management in the emerging era of AI agents.