Stripe Participates in Funding Round for Developer Tools Company Clerk

Clerk, a developer tools company providing a React-friendly authentication solution, has secured $30 million in Series B financing to expand its services into authorization.

The funding round was led by CRV, with participation from Stripe and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Madrona, Clerk said in a Tuesday (Jan. 23) press release.

Clerk’s authentication solution has gained significant traction, serving over 1,300 paying customers and experiencing sixteenfold growth in total managed users since its previous funding round in January 2022, according to the release.

With this new investment, Clerk aims to go beyond user identification and delve into determining user permissions, the release said.

A major milestone for Clerk is its new partnership with billing solution Stripe, per the release. By integrating with Stripe Billing, Clerk will be able to create and manage user subscriptions, which is crucial since user permissions often depend on their subscription plan. This collaboration will enable Clerk to provide a robust authorization solution.

Colin Sidoti, CEO of Clerk, said in the release that there has been demand from customers to integrate with Stripe since Clerk’s launch. Sidoti highlighted the challenge of synchronizing billing information with authorization engines, saying that makes it natural for developers to turn to Clerk for a solution.

The Series B financing will play a crucial role in Clerk’s product development, team expansion and mission to provide easy-to-implement, secure and user-friendly security solutions for developers, the release said.

“The <SignIn/> and <UserProfile/> components from Clerk have already set a new standard in authentication, and proven that components are the new APIs,” Reid Christian, general partner at CRV, said in the release. “We’re thrilled to support Clerk as they apply their solutions to the authorization market.”

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that about half of banking customers want to play an active role in verifying their identities for online financial transactions.

Fifty-two percent and 47% of customers, respectively, want to manually authenticate their identities every time they log in to their bank accounts or for money transfers to and from family and friends, according to “Consumer Behaviors and Perceived Security Across Devices,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and Entersekt collaboration.