Notion acquires ZeroEntropy, the AI search startup co-founded by Moroccan CEO Ghita Houir Alami

Notion has acquired ZeroEntropy, the San Francisco–based AI search infrastructure startup co-founded by Moroccan engineer Ghita Houir Alami, with the entire ZeroEntropy team joining Notion and Houir Alami taking charge of Notion’s Model Research group. Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal follows a commercial relationship in which Notion AI’s unified search ran on ZeroEntropy’s reranking model zerank-2 for the past two months.

"cut latency on the rerank step by 85% while holding quality," the company said, describing the performance gains achieved after deploying zerank-2 in Notion AI's unified search.

ZeroEntropy was founded in 2024 by Ghita Houir Alami and CTO Nicholas Pipitone. The startup built developer-first retrieval infrastructure: an API that handled ingestion, indexing, reranking and evaluation for retrieval-augmented generation and AI agents. The company's thesis argued that narrow, repeatable steps inside AI pipelines — reranking, embedding, classification, routing and query rewriting — do not require frontier models and that small, task-specific models can run them faster and more cheaply.

The startup went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch and raised a $4.2 million seed round in July 2025 led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Transpose Platform, 22 Ventures and an a16z Scout, plus angels from OpenAI, Hugging Face and Front. In its first six months ZeroEntropy processed close to 100 million documents and about a million queries, demonstrating traction with developer and enterprise users.

As part of the acquisition, ZeroEntropy is open-sourcing all of its models under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, allowing existing users to self-serve the models through any inference provider without a commercial license. The startup’s products, including the zsearch search engine, will remain supported until 4 September; new signups have already been disabled and customers are being directed to a migration guide.

Co‑founder Ghita Houir Alami brings a transnational technical background to the role at Notion. Born and raised in Rabat, she left Morocco at 17 to study at École Polytechnique in France, earning a BS/MS in applied mathematics before completing a master’s at UC Berkeley. Nicholas Pipitone, ZeroEntropy’s CTO, left Carnegie Mellon and had previously served as CTO or lead developer at five early-stage startups.

Context and regional significance

• The acquisition marks another exit for a MENA-founded developer infrastructure company into a U.S. platform, following a recent transaction involving an Egyptian-founded startup that joined Vercel.
• ZeroEntropy’s decision to open-source its models aims to ease transitions for developers and preserve access to the reranking technology beyond the Notion integration.
• Notion’s adoption of a smaller, task-specific reranker over larger competitors highlights a growing industry trade-off between model size and latency/cost efficiency for production search and retrieval tasks.

Outlook: With Ghita Houir Alami leading Notion’s Model Research group and the ZeroEntropy team integrated into Notion, the company is positioned to continue optimizing retrieval components inside Notion AI while making the underlying models available to the broader developer community via open-source releases. Customers of ZeroEntropy’s commercial products have a defined migration path through early September, and the move underscores continued consolidation in AI infrastructure where product teams favor specialized, lower-latency models for building search and agent features.