Ghita Houir Alami is a 25-year-old entrepreneur who co-founded ZeroEntropy. Along the way she’s raised more than $4.2 million in seed funding for her San Francisco –based startup. Nicolas Pipitone co-founded ZeroEntropy to build open source, developer first search infrastructure. Increasing AI models’ efficacy and efficiency in retrieving the most relevant information is their aim.
Alami is a native of Morocco and grew up there. At 17, she emigrated from her home country in West Africa to attend an engineering school in France. She studied at École Polytechnique, one of France’s most elite schools, famed for its brutal emphasis on mathematics and its military discipline. Her success, from Morocco to the tech industry, is a testament to her drive to break bounds. She encourages the next generation of women to pursue careers in STEM fields.
ZeroEntropy’s creative infrastructure empowers organizations to experiment with and deploy precision, rapid retrieval systems in an intuitive and efficient manner. Alami characterizes ZeroEntropy as something like a “Supabase for search,” highlighting how easy it is for developers to implement. The startup’s proprietary re-ranker, ze-rank-1, beats similar performance benchmarks achieved by models from Cohere and Salesforce. In particular, it outperforms existing best models on all public and private retrieval benchmarks.
Over a dozen early-stage companies have already adopted ZeroEntropy to build new AI agents. That’s just a taste of all the ways this exciting startup is poised to change the AI landscape for the better. Alami’s real-world understanding of the difficult barriers teams face in the current economy. He argues that too many are either assembling a patchwork solution from other tools, or they’re going all in with LLMs by just dumping their entire knowledge base into them. The first approach is both tedious to construct and maintain.
Alami’s commitment to empowering the next generation of women in technology goes well beyond her work at ZeroEntropy. She is an active speaker in Moroccan high schools and universities. Her mission now is to encourage younger girls to enter STEM-related professions.
“There aren’t many women in DevTools or AI infra. 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.” – Ghita Houir Alami
The young startup is addressing a big pain point in the AI space. It’s very much an effort to open the floodgates of potential with emerging retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technologies. Zoe Perret, a prominent figure in the industry, praises ZeroEntropy’s innovative solutions: “We’ve met a lot of teams building in and around RAG, but Ghita and Nicolas’s models outperform everything we’ve seen. Retrieval is actually no doubt the secret sauce in this next frontier of AI, and ZeroEntropy is the one developing it.
Alami imagines ZeroEntropy to be the next great enabler of models having rapid access to pertinent information, at scale. Such a solution gets right to the heart of the burgeoning need for efficiency as AI technologies design the future. Alami’s engineering experience and entrepreneurial focus go hand in hand. She is at the head of a pioneering movement to culture the tech industry.
