Clerk, the authentication startup, lands $30M and inks a strategic deal with Stripe

**Clerk** raised a $30M Series B led by CRV with participation from Stripe, Andreessen Horowitz, and Madrona (total funding $55.5M) to expand from authentication into authorization, including a strategic integration with Stripe Billing to map user permissions to subscription plans; the company reports ~1,300 paying customers, 16M managed users, and plans to grow from 55 to 80 employees while competing with Descope, Stytch, and WorkOS.