Rabat – Notion has acquired ZeroEntropy, an AI infrastructure startup co-founded and led by Moroccan engineer Ghita Houir Alami, bringing the company’s retrieval technology and team into the productivity software company.
Notion said ZeroEntropy had developed “high-efficiency training and inference for task-specific models,” adding that the startup’s entire team would join Notion.
Houir Alami, who was born and raised in Morocco, co-founded ZeroEntropy with Nicholas Pipitone in 2024 and serves as the company’s CEO.
ZeroEntropy was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch.
She holds master’s degrees in applied mathematics from École Polytechnique in France and the University of California, Berkeley.
Her path into artificial intelligence 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 study mathematics at UC Berkeley, before co-founding ZeroEntropy.
Building AI infrastructure around retrieval
ZeroEntropy focused on a technical area that sits behind many AI applications: information retrieval.
Before an AI system can generate an answer based on a large collection of information, it needs to identify the material most relevant to a user’s query. ZeroEntropy developed models and infrastructure intended to improve that process.
The company’s technology covered tasks including reranking, embedding, classification, routing, query rewriting, and context compression.
Its approach centered on smaller, specialized models designed for individual AI workloads rather than relying entirely on large general-purpose models. The goal was to improve the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of AI applications.
ZeroEntropy attracted investment as demand for AI infrastructure continued to grow.
In July 2025, the company 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.
TechCrunch reported at the time that ZeroEntropy’s technology was being used by more than 10 early-stage AI companies across sectors including healthcare, law, customer support, and sales.
The acquisition by Notion marks a new phase for the startup less than two years after its founding.
