Ghita Houir Alami
| Ghita Houir Alami | |
| Nationality | Moroccan |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, CEO |
| Known for | Co-founder and CEO of ZeroEntropy |
Ghita Houir Alami is a Moroccan entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of ZeroEntropy, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup that develops search and retrieval infrastructure for AI applications. The company participated in Y Combinator and raised $4.2 million in seed funding in 2025.[1]
Early life and education
Houir Alami was born in Casablanca, Morocco.[2] She attended one of France's prestigious grandes écoles, and in July 2020, as a student, she was selected to participate in the French Bastille Day military parade on the Champs-Élysées.[3]
Career
Houir Alami co-founded ZeroEntropy with CTO Nicolas Pipitone. The company focuses on improving retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology, which allows AI systems to access and incorporate external data sources when generating responses. ZeroEntropy provides an API-based platform that handles data ingestion, indexing, and evaluation, offering enterprise-grade search and retrieval capabilities.[4]
The company's core products include rerankers and embedding models designed to improve the accuracy of information retrieval. Its reranker model, zerank-2, is an open-weight model that the company states outperforms competing offerings from firms such as Cohere and Jina AI. ZeroEntropy also offers zembed-1, a proprietary embedding model, and an end-to-end search engine that allows developers to integrate AI-powered search into applications.[5]
In July 2025, ZeroEntropy announced a $4.2 million seed funding round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Transpose Platform, 22 Ventures, and a16z Scout, as well as angel investors from companies including OpenAI and Hugging Face. Zoe Perret, a partner at Initialized Capital, cited the performance of the company's models as a distinguishing factor among teams working on RAG technology.[6]
ZeroEntropy competes in a growing sector of AI infrastructure companies focused on retrieval, which includes MongoDB's VoyageAI and other Y Combinator-backed startups such as Sid.ai.
References
- ↑ "Moroccan founder raises $4.2M for her YC-backed startup building the next layer of AI search". 'TechCrunch}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Une étudiante marocaine défilera sur les Champs-Elysées lors du 14 juillet". 'Maroc Diplomatique}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Une étudiante marocaine défilera sur les Champs-Elysées lors du 14 juillet". 'Maroc Diplomatique}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "ZeroEntropy". 'ZeroEntropy}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "ZeroEntropy". 'ZeroEntropy}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.
- ↑ "Moroccan founder raises $4.2M for her YC-backed startup building the next layer of AI search". 'TechCrunch}'. Retrieved 2026-03-19.