Latest news with #GhitaHouirAlami
Arabian Post
10-07-2025
- Business
- Arabian Post
Moroccan‐Born Duo Secures $4.2 Million to Sharpen AI Search Precision
San Francisco–based ZeroEntropy has emerged at the forefront of a crucial yet underrepresented segment in artificial intelligence: retrieval‑augmented generation. The startup, co‑founded by Moroccan engineer Ghita Houir Alami and CTO Nicolas Pipitone, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding to refine how large language models access contextually relevant data. This investment underscores growing investor conviction that LLM performance hinges on the quality of retrieved information, not just model size. ZeroEntropy's funding round was driven by Initialized Capital, with contributions from Y Combinator, Transpose Platform, 22 Ventures, and a16z Scout. Angel support included operators from leading AI platforms such as OpenAI, Hugging Face, and Front. Initialized partner Zoe Perret highlighted the startup's standout offering: 'Retrieval is undeniably a critical unlock in the next frontier of AI, and ZeroEntropy is building it'. Key to ZeroEntropy's solution is its API, which streamlines the ingestion, indexing, embedding, re‑ranking, and evaluation of data sources—a departure from the piecemeal approaches typical in the field. Its proprietary re‑ranker, ze‑rank‑1, claims superior performance on public and private benchmarks, outperforming models from Cohere and Salesforce. The startup emphasises that effective retrieval must go beyond semantic similarity; it must interpret nuanced queries involving negation, multi‑hop reasoning, and fuzzy filters—capabilities that standard systems often miss. ADVERTISEMENT Developers using ZeroEntropy gain a 'Supabase for search' experience, according to Houir Alami, enabling rapid deployment of high‑precision retrieval systems even across messy internal documentation. More than ten early‑stage AI startups spanning healthcare, legal, customer support and sales are among its initial adopters. Houir Alami's background is integral to the company's vision. Raised in Morocco, she earned engineering credentials at École Polytechnique in France before pursuing a master's in mathematics at UC Berkeley. Her experience attempting to build a conversational AI prior to ChatGPT's rise clarified the importance of structured, precise context retrieval—a realisation that shaped ZeroEntropy's mission. At 25, she is a rare female leader in AI infrastructure, and her outreach efforts in Morocco aim to inspire more young women to pursue STEM fields. The funding will be used to expand engineering and go‑to‑market capabilities. As AI systems become more integrated into workflows, LLM hallucinations—errors resulting from irrelevant or inaccurate retrieved context—pose growing risks in mission‑critical domains. Legal reasoning, medical decision‑making, and financial analysis demand systems that can reliably source authoritative evidence. ZeroEntropy's platform seeks to ensure that AI agents not only surface relevant data but contextualise and rank it properly, reducing risky missteps. RAG architecture remains the go‑to method for generative AI tools—chatbots referencing HR policies or legal documents, customer‑support agents pulling from product manuals—but its effectiveness depends on retrieval robustness. Competitors like MongoDB's VoyageAI and fellow YC startups such as Sid. ai target similar spaces. Yet ZeroEntropy's focus on a unified API and superior re‑ranking appears to distinguish it. Investor and market perspectives affirm the strategic significance of RAG. Initialized Capital's support, along with angel participants from well‑known AI firms, signals institutional belief in ZeroEntropy's potential to become foundational infrastructure for developers building LLM‑enhanced applications. The round's breadth—spanning VCs, angels, and YC—reflects confidence across the investment community. ZeroEntropy's approach is particularly relevant as AI adoption scales in domains requiring stringent compliance, audit trails, and domain specificity. In such environments, AI agents must offer traceable citations and verifiable output. ZeroEntropy's API gives teams a deterministic retrieval backbone, improving both speed and reliability of source retrieval. Ze‑rank‑1's benchmark performance provides early validation for its technological edge. The company's trajectory—from its founding in 2024 to securing major investment in mid‑2025—reveals rapid market resonance. The startup's diaspora roots, bridging Morocco, Europe and Silicon Valley, also reflect AI's increasingly global talent landscape.
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Moroccan founder raises $4.2M for her YC-backed startup building the next layer of AI search
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 '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.
TechCrunch
09-07-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Moroccan founder raises $4.2M for her YC-backed startup building the next layer of AI search
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 '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. Techcrunch event Save up to $475 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $450 on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW 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.' L-R: Nicolas Pipitone (CTO) and Ghita Houir Alami (CEO) Image Credits:ZeroEntropy 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.
