US-based Moroccan entrepreneur Ghita Houir Alami, co-founder and CEO of the AI startup ZeroEntropy, has raised $4.2 million in a seed round led by American venture capital firm Initialized Capital. ZeroEntropy (YC W25) builds high-accuracy search systems for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and AI agents. Since its launch in January, the company has processed nearly 100 million documents and close to one million queries. The company also announced the release of its state-of-the-art reranker, zerank-1, a new AI model that significantly improves search accuracy. It enhances any first-stage search system, including BM25 and OpenAI embeddings, by up to 28%, and outperforms top models like Cohere's rerank-3.5 and Salesforce's LlamaRank in domains such as finance and STEM, reads an introduction by the company. «The newly launched zerank-1 model, trained using a chess ELO score-inspired pipeline, outperforms every other model on public and private benchmarks while being faster and cheaper», Ghita said in a video shared last week on her social media. «And here's the best part: zerank-1 is already live through our API and fully integrated into our search engine. So if you are using ZeroEntropy, your retrieval just improved automatically». Originally from Rabat, Ghita holds a master's degree in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley, with a focus on Machine Learning and Operations Research. She also earned a BS/MS in Applied Mathematics from Ecole Polytechnique, France's top engineering school, where she specialized in Data Science. Her academic journey began at the elite preparatory program of Lycée Sainte-Geneviève, and she graduated with highest honors from Lycée Descartes in Rabat. Ghita was also a top 10 finalist in the U.S. Embassy's science contest and received an Honorable Mention at the 2017 International Physics Olympiad.
