Moroccan founder raises $4.2M for her YC-backed startup building the next layer of AI search

Yahoo

09-07-2025

As generative AI reshapes industries, one of its most important yet invisible challenges is retrieval, the process of fetching the right data with relevant context from messy knowledge bases. Large language models (LLMs) are only as accurate as the information they can retrieve.
That's where ZeroEntropy wants to make its mark. The San Francisco-based startup, co-founded by CEO Ghita Houir Alami and CTO Nicolas Pipitone, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding to help models retrieve relevant data quickly, accurately, and at scale.
The round was led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Transpose Platform, 22 Ventures, a16z Scout, and a long list of angels, including operators from OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Front.
ZeroEntropy joins a growing wave of infrastructure companies hoping to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to power search for the next generation of AI agents. Competitors range from MongoDB's VoyageAI to early fellow YC startups like Sid.ai.
'We've met a lot of teams building in and around RAG, but Ghita and Nicolas's models outperform everything we've seen,' says Zoe Perret, partner at Initialized Capital. 'Retrieval is undeniably a critical unlock in the next frontier of AI, and ZeroEntropy is building it.'
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grabs data from external documents and has become a go-to architecture for AI agents, whether it's a chatbot surfacing HR policies or a legal assistant citing case law.
Yet the ZeroEntropy founders believe that for many AI apps, this layer is fragile: a cobbled collection of vector databases, keyword search, and re-ranking models. ZeroEntropy offers an API that manages ingestion, indexing, re-ranking, and evaluation.
What that means is that — unlike a search product for enterprise employees like Glean — ZeroEntropy is strictly a developer tool. It quickly grabs data, even across messy internal documents. Houir Alami likens her startup to a 'Supabase for search' referring to the popular open-source database that automates much of the database management.
'Right now, most teams are either stitching together existing tools from the market or dumping their entire knowledge base into an LLM's context window. The first approach is time-consuming to build and maintain,' Houir Alami said. 'The second approach can cause compounding errors. We're building a developer-first search infrastructure—think of it like a Supabase for search—designed to make deploying accurate, fast retrieval systems easy and efficient.'
At its core is its proprietary re-ranker called ze-rank-1, which the company claims currently outperforms similar models from Cohere and Salesforce on both public and private retrieval benchmarks. It makes sure that when an AI system looks for answers in a knowledge base, it grabs the most relevant information first.
More than 10 early-stage companies building AI agents across verticals such as healthcare, law, customer support, and sales are already using ZeroEntropy, she adds.
Born and raised in Morocco, Houir Alami left home at 17 to pursue engineering education in France, attending École Polytechnique, a prestigious military and mathematics-focused institution. There, she discovered her love for machine learning.
She moved to California two years ago to complete a master's in mathematics at UC Berkeley, where she deepened her interest in building intelligent systems.
Before founding ZeroEntropy, Houir Alami dabbled in building an AI assistant—her take on a conversational agent—before ChatGPT became mainstream. She says the insight gained from trying to build that assistant, particularly the realization of how important it was to provide the right context and information to the LLM to be useful, partly inspired her to start ZeroEntropy.
In a field often criticized for its lack of diversity, the 25-year-old Houir Alami is one of the few female CEOs building deep infrastructure for one of the hardest problems in AI. Yet, she hopes it doesn't stay that way for long.
'There aren't many women in DevTools or AI infra,' she said. 'But I'd tell any young woman interested in technical problems: don't let that stop you. If you're drawn to complex, technical problems, don't let anyone make you feel like you're not capable of pursuing them. You should go for it.'
She also stays connected to her roots by giving talks at high schools and universities in Morocco, aiming to inspire more young girls to pursue STEM.