Developers building front-end Jamstack web applications often struggle to build identity with traditional API tools. With the approach gaining popularity, Clerk’s founders decided to focus their startup on building a simplified identity tool built specifically for React applications.
The company today announced a $15 million Series A led by Madrona.
Colin Sidoti, who co-founded the company with his brother Braden, sees what’s happening with Jamstack and React as a fundamental architectural shift where front-end developers will increasingly sit at the table.
When they started the company, they started with the idea of building a direct identity API, but there wasn’t much difference from what they already saw in the market with Auth0. Then they decided to focus on identity for the growing Jamstack crowd instead.
What the Sidoti brothers did was build a solution from React components, instead of going the API route as Auth0 did. It allows developers to put identity into their application in minutes, instead of spending hours building it.
“I think React, and really the architecture shift that comes with it, is going to win. We see [companies like] Vercel really changes the way developers think about hosting. You can say they focus on React or you can say they focus on Next.js but I look at what they’re focusing on is this front-end developer the person in charge of the interface is suddenly more a stakeholder than ever before,” Sidoti told TechCrunch.
The solution seems to be catching on with the developer community, with 500% growth in just five months and one million users under management. The startup offers a free plan and then three tiered payment plans called Hobby, Business, and Enterprise with different features depending on the plan.
Clerk currently has 26 employees and they are looking to add about 15 more people this year. “We are definitely hiring. The system needs to be scaled and we need engineers to scale it. Sales pipelines are finally growing, so we’re hiring people on the sales side as well. And then there’s always the product area growth,” he said.
He says they are working to be more diverse, recognizing that they lacked diversity in their early hiring. “We actually rented a lot early on in Greece. And so for a long time our party was just a bunch of Greek men. And that wasn’t particularly helpful for diversity and I think we saw the traditional struggles that come with the lack of diversity. And so it has become a focus of attention when hiring. A lot of that is like working with recruiters who are better able to get into other networks,” he said.
Madrona’s general manager Karan Mehandru will join the board of directors under the terms of the deal. He was an early investor in Auth0 and sees many similarities in Clerk in a more modern context.
“Clerk is a foundational technology company fully dedicated to serving the needs of the next generation of application developers as the authentication industry migrates from back-end APIs to front-end component modules,” he said in a statement.
It is interesting to note that Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, is also an investor in today’s round, along with Mango Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, S28 Capital and Fathom Capital.