Moroccan Founder’s AI Startup Acquired by Notion Less Than Two Years After Launch

At 26, Ghita Houir Alami has just reached a milestone many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs dream of. On July 24, 2026, US company Notion, known for its productivity software used around the world, announced its acquisition of ZeroEntropy, an artificial intelligence startup. Behind the young company is a Moroccan engineer who left her country at just 17 to pursue her scientific ambitions.

Her journey began far from California’s major technology companies. Born and raised in Morocco, Ghita developed a passion for mathematics and physics at a very young age. As a teenager, she devoured books and documentaries about science, imagining a career as a researcher rather than starting a company in the United States.

At 17, she left to study in France, notably attending the prestigious École polytechnique, where she discovered machine learning, a field at the heart of advances in artificial intelligence. She then continued her education at the University of California, Berkeley, near San Francisco, where she pursued a master’s degree in mathematics.

While developing a conversational assistant, she identified a technical problem: even the most powerful artificial intelligence models can produce incorrect answers when they do not have the right information. She decided to tackle this challenge rather than create yet another chatbot.

With American engineer Nicholas Pipitone, she founded ZeroEntropy in 2024. The company develops tools that can quickly retrieve and select the most relevant information from large volumes of documents. The technology is especially useful for professional applications that use AI.

A small startup that impresses Notion

The young company quickly attracted investors. In July 2025, ZeroEntropy announced a $4.2 million funding round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and other investors. In a profile published by TechCrunch, Ghita, then 25, said she wanted to make the search systems used by AI faster, more reliable and easier to deploy.

Notion was among its clients. The US company began using one of the models developed by ZeroEntropy to improve its built-in search engine. The results convinced its executives to take the next step.

According to the performance figures Notion disclosed when it acquired the company, ZeroEntropy’s technology sped up searches by as much as 30% and cut by 85% the time needed for one stage of ranking results, while preserving their relevance. A small team had thus replaced solutions from much larger, better-funded competitors.

The US company ultimately decided to acquire ZeroEntropy, less than two years after its founding. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

All of the startup’s employees are joining Notion. Ghita Houir Alami, previously ZeroEntropy’s CEO, will lead a new team focused on research into artificial intelligence models.

But this young Moroccan woman’s story also includes an unexpected episode that took place at her family home in Morocco.

During a return to the Kingdom to take care of administrative formalities, Ghita was visited by her co-founder Nicholas Pipitone, who had traveled all the way from the United States to work alongside her. Her family then turned the living room into an improvised office so the two entrepreneurs could continue their work.

In a LinkedIn post, she recounted that her co-founder’s meeting with her parents brought them closer. “Having Nick meet my family brought us closer than ever,” she said, noting how learning about each other’s cultures strengthened the trust between the two founders.

That trust helped ZeroEntropy grow to the point of acquisition. In its official announcement, Notion highlighted the small team’s ability to develop, in less than two years, technology that could rival that of companies with far greater resources.

Ghita Houir Alami continues to maintain ties with Morocco. She speaks at high schools and universities in the Kingdom, encouraging young women to pursue science and engineering. “Don’t let anyone make you believe that you’re not capable of solving complex technical problems,” she told TechCrunch in July 2025, referring to the underrepresentation of women in her field.