Employeea startup that builds a suite of embeddable UIs, APIs and admin dashboards that app developers can use to authenticate and manage users has raised $30 million in a Series B round led by CRV with participation from Stripe; Andreessen Horowitz and Madrona.
The proceeds bring Clerk’s total to $55.5 million, and co-founder and CEO Colin Sidoti says it will go toward expanding Clerk’s service beyond authentication and authorization — that is, determining which licenses has a user versus simply recognizing who they are.
“Authorization has always been part of our product vision, but we needed a successful authentication product to build on top,” Sidoti told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Clerk’s authentication service has seen phenomenal growth in 2023, and now there are a multitude of customers asking for authorization.”
Clerk was founded in March 2019 by Sidoti and his brother, Braden Sidoti. Both are engineers — Colin has a degree from MIT, while Braden graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and previously worked at Uber and Inspirato.
Clerk builds developer tools for authentication by offering drop-in components coded in React, the open source JavaScript front-end library. The Clerk attempts to detect malicious activity, such as bots, while managing user data on behalf of clients.
“Although authentication and authorization are ubiquitous challenges in every software company, they have been extremely slow to outsource,” said Colin. “When you ask developers why, they often point out that authentication and authorization are too closely tied to the rest of their application to outsource. To solve this, Clerk defines authentication a little differently than our competitors: in some areas we do more, in others less.
Clerk — primarily a self-service platform, with pricing based on the number of monthly active users — will soon integrate Stripe Billing to determine user entitlements based on their subscription plan. The integration is prompted in part by Stripe’s investment, which Colin says marks the beginning of a “strategic partnership” between the two companies.
“Stripe Billing helps developers create and manage user subscriptions,” he added. “Since permission to access certain features is typically dependent on a user’s subscription plan, Clerk requires tight integration with Stripe Billing to create a robust authorization solution.”
Clerk, which claims to have about 1,300 paying customers and 16 million users under management for those customers, plans to grow its workforce from 55 people to 80 by the end of the year as it competes with pioneers such as Descope, Stytch and WorkOS. “2023 has been an amazing year for Clerk and we expect continued acceleration in 2024,” said Colin.
