Rabat – Moroccan engineer and entrepreneur Ghita Houir Alami has reached a major milestone in the US technology industry after Notion acquired ZeroEntropy, the AI search infrastructure startup she co-founded and leads as CEO.

Notion also confirmed the move on its official blog, describing ZeroEntropy as a company building “efficient, task-specific models” for knowledge work. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

From Morocco to Silicon Valley

Houir Alami, who was born and raised in Morocco, co-founded ZeroEntropy with Nicholas Pipitone. 

According to Y Combinator, where ZeroEntropy was part of the Winter 2025 batch, Houir Alami is the company’s co-founder and CEO and holds master’s degrees in applied mathematics from Ecole Polytechnique in France and UC Berkeley.

Her journey into AI began with engineering and mathematics. In an interview with TechCrunch, Houir Alami said she left Morocco at 17 to pursue engineering studies in France, where she developed an interest in machine learning. 

She later moved to California to complete a master’s degree in mathematics at UC Berkeley.

ZeroEntropy

Founded in 2024, ZeroEntropy focused on a less visible but increasingly important part of artificial intelligence: retrieval.

AI systems need to find relevant information before they can generate useful answers. 

ZeroEntropy developed tools designed to help AI applications retrieve information from large and often unstructured collections of data more accurately and efficiently.

The company described its mission as building specialized models for workloads including reranking, embedding, classification, routing, query rewriting, and context compression. 

Rather than relying exclusively on large general-purpose models, ZeroEntropy aimed to build smaller, task-specific systems that could make AI applications faster and more cost-efficient.

The startup’s technology attracted significant attention from the AI industry. 

In July 2025, ZeroEntropy raised $4.2 million (MAD 38.6 million) in seed funding in a round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and other investors. 

At the time, TechCrunch reported that the company was already being used by more than 10 early-stage AI companies across areas including healthcare, law, customer support, and sales.