Clerk

About Clerk

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by Clerk

All products by Clerk reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

ClerkAI DevOps

Authentication and user management platform for developers

From $20/mo8.0/10

How Our Review Panel Scores Clerk

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Clerk's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.6 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.

Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.

Competitive Landscape

Who Clerk competes with, and how they differ.

Auth0

Auth0 (owned by Okta since 2021) is an older, broader CIAM platform priced on monthly-active-user tiers with deep enterprise SSO support; Clerk differentiates on pre-built React/Next.js UI components and a faster developer-first setup for smaller product teams.

W

WorkOS

WorkOS sells enterprise-readiness modules (SAML SSO, SCIM directory sync, audit logs) that plug into a team's existing auth system, while Clerk is a standalone auth platform with its own UI components, session management and user database.

F

Firebase Authentication

Firebase Authentication is a free, deeply-integrated piece of Google's Firebase suite with minimal prebuilt UI, whereas Clerk charges per monthly active user and ships polished, customizable UI components plus organization/B2B features Firebase lacks natively.

Okta

Okta targets enterprise workforce identity and IT-managed SSO across many internal apps at enterprise price points, whereas Clerk is built for product engineering teams embedding customer-facing authentication directly into their own applications.

Supabase8.1/10

Supabase Auth ships as one module inside a broader open-source Postgres/BaaS platform (database, storage, edge functions), competing with Clerk mainly on the "add auth quickly" use case rather than as a dedicated identity specialist.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Clerk's history, with sources.

1. Apr 22, 2026Launch

   Launched Clerk CLI

   Clerk shipped a terminal-first CLI (clerk init, clerk config pull/patch, clerk api) covering eight frameworks including Next.js, React and Astro, with agent-focused bundled skills for AI coding tools.

   clerk.com
2. Oct 15, 2025Funding

   Series C — $50M led by Menlo Ventures and Anthropic's Anthology Fund

   Clerk raised a $50M Series C led by Menlo Ventures and Anthropic's Anthology Fund, with Georgian and previous investors participating. The announcement cited over 200 million managed users across roughly 15,000 applications and signaled a push into AI-agent identity and authentication.

   clerk.com
3. Jan 23, 2024Funding

   Series B — $30M led by CRV, with strategic Stripe partnership

   Clerk raised a $30M Series B led by CRV, with new investor Stripe joining alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Madrona. The round came with a strategic partnership to integrate Stripe Billing for subscription-based access control. TechCrunch reported total funding to date of $55.5M and roughly 1,300 paying customers managing 16 million users.

   techcrunch.com
4. Mar 22, 2023Funding

   Series A — $15M led by Madrona Venture Group

   Clerk raised a $15M Series A led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and returning investors Andreessen Horowitz, S28 Capital and Fathom Capital. The company reported monthly active users had grown 500% over the prior five months and had crossed one million managed users.

   clerk.com
5. Nov 30, 2022Funding

   Seed — $6.2M led by Andreessen Horowitz

   Clerk raised a $6.2M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (partner Martin Casado), with S28 Capital, Fathom Capital and South Park Commons participating. Clerk offers pre-built React authentication components (SignUp, SignIn, UserProfile) rather than a raw API.

   clerk.com
6. March 2019Founded

   Clerk founded by Colin and Braden Sidoti

   Clerk was founded in March 2019 by Colin Sidoti and Braden Sidoti as a developer-first authentication and user-management platform for modern web frameworks.

   techcrunch.com