Notion has acquired ZeroEntropy, an AI search infrastructure startup co-founded by Moroccan engineer and CEO Ghita Houir Alami, in a deal that will see the startup's entire team join Notion.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Houir Alami will lead Notion's Model Research team as part of the acquisition.

ZeroEntropy's Technology Already Powers Notion AI Search

The acquisition follows an existing commercial relationship between the two companies. Notion has been using ZeroEntropy's zerank-2 reranking model to power its unified AI search for the past two months.

According to ZeroEntropy, the deployment replaced models from larger competitors and reduced latency in the reranking process by 85% while maintaining search quality.

ZeroEntropy, founded in 2024 by Houir Alami and CTO Nicholas Pipitone, built developer-focused retrieval infrastructure for AI applications, including APIs for ingestion, indexing, reranking and evaluation.

The startup raised $4.2 million in seed funding in July 2025, led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Transpose Platform, 22 Ventures and a16z Scout.

Moroccan Engineer Takes on New Role at Notion

As part of the acquisition, ZeroEntropy will open-source all its models under the Apache 2.0 licence on Hugging Face, allowing developers to use them through inference providers without a commercial licence.

Its existing products, including the zsearch search engine, will be discontinued in September, with customers being directed to migration resources.

Houir Alami, who was born and raised in Rabat before moving to France at 17 to study applied mathematics at École Polytechnique and later completing a master's degree at UC Berkeley, will now lead Notion's Model Research team.

The acquisition marks another notable outcome for a MENA-founded technology startup and highlights the growing role of AI infrastructure companies in powering the next generation of enterprise and productivity software.