Clerk, a San Francisco-based company that provides a drop-in authentication and user management solution for React, has announced that it has raised $15 million in its Series A funding round.
The funding round was led by Madrona, a venture capital firm, with Karan Mehandru, the Managing Director of Madrona, joining Clerk’s board. Other investors that participated in this funding round include Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel, Mango Capital, and Dave Wilner, the former CRO of Auth0. Existing investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz, S28 Capital, and Fathom Capital, also contributed to the funding round.
With the new funding, Clerk plans to accelerate its roadmap beyond authentication and into authorization. Authorization involves the knowledge of a user’s role, permissions, billing plan, and entitlements. Clerk aims to provide developers with the tools they need to build authorization controls for their end-users and to provide the glue that binds these systems together. This will help developers manage their customers’ data in a more streamlined and efficient way.
Co-founder and CEO of Clerk, Colin Sidoti, said that the response from React and Next.js developers had been incredible, with monthly active users growing 500% in the past five months. Clerk has managed over a million users since its inception. Sidoti also stated that he was excited to tap into Karan Mehandru’s experience in identity and scaling go-to-market as they target the next generation of application development.
Clerk’s platform provides a security and authentication experience to any website, allowing B2B businesses to control their account security with multi-factor authentication while preventing hacking threats. Clerk’s vision is to build a complete customer management solution for developers, helping facilitate authentication, authorization, communications, billing, and more. The company believes that these essential services can be bundled together and presented cohesively in simple React components.
Clerk’s drop-in authentication and user management solution has become popular among React developers due to its ease of use and flexibility. It allows developers to easily add authentication and user management features to their websites without having to build them from scratch. Clerk’s platform also provides developers with tools to customize the user interface and control user access to different parts of their website. With the additional funding from its Series A round, Clerk is well-positioned to expand its offerings and continue to provide innovative solutions to the growing needs of developers and businesses.
