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Notion has acquired ZeroEntropy, the San Francisco AI search infrastructure startup co-founded by Moroccan engineer Ghita Houir Alami, with the entire team joining the productivity software company and Houir Alami taking charge of its Model Research team. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition follows a commercial relationship that began with Notion as a customer. Notion AI's unified search has run on zerank-2, ZeroEntropy's reranking model, for the past two months, a deployment that replaced models from larger and better-funded competitors and cut latency on the rerank step by 85% while holding quality, according to the company.
ZeroEntropy is open-sourcing all of its models under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face as part of the deal, letting existing users self-serve them through any inference provider without a commercial licence. Its own products, including the zsearch search engine, remain supported until 4 September, after which they will be sunset, with new signups already disabled and customers directed to a migration guide.
Founded in 2024 by Houir Alami and CTO Nicholas Pipitone, ZeroEntropy went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and built developer-first retrieval infrastructure, an API handling ingestion, indexing, reranking and evaluation for retrieval-augmented generation and AI agents.
Its underlying thesis was that the narrow, repeatable steps inside AI pipelines, reranking, embedding, classification, routing, query rewriting, do not need frontier models, and that small task-specific ones can run them faster and cheaper.
The company raised a $4.2 million seed in July 2025 led by Initialized Capital, with Y Combinator, Transpose Platform, 22 Ventures and a16z Scout participating alongside angels from OpenAI, Hugging Face and Front, having processed close to 100 million documents and a million queries in its first six months.
Houir Alami was born and raised in Rabat and left Morocco at 17 for École Polytechnique in France, where she took a BS/MS in applied mathematics, before completing a master's at UC Berkeley. Pipitone dropped out of Carnegie Mellon and had served as CTO or lead developer at five early-stage startups before ZeroEntropy.
The deal is the second exit in a fortnight for a MENA-founded developer infrastructure startup absorbed into a US platform, after Egyptian-founded DevOps agent company Stakpak joined Vercel last week, both companies having raised institutional capital only in the past 18 months.
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