Notion acquires AI-retrieval startup ZeroEntropy

Notion has acquired ZeroEntropy , the San Francisco AI search-infrastructure startup building developer-first retrieval for retrieval-augmented generation and AI agents. Financial terms were not disclosed. ZeroEntropy's entire team is joining Notion, with co-founder and CEO Ghita Houir Alami set to lead a newly formed Model Research team.

The acquisition follows a commercial relationship that began with Notion as a customer. Notion AI's unified search has run on ZeroEntropy's zerank-2 reranking model for two months, a deployment that replaced models from larger, better-funded rivals while cutting rerank latency by 85%. As part of the deal, ZeroEntropy is open-sourcing all of its models under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, letting existing users self-serve them through any inference provider without a commercial licence; its own products will be supported until September 4, 2026.

Founded in 2024 by Houir Alami and CTO Nicholas Pipitone , ZeroEntropy went through Y Combinator 's Winter 2025 batch and raised a $4.2M seed round led by Initialized Capital with backing from Andreessen Horowitz . Its API handled ingestion, indexing, reranking and evaluation for AI retrieval pipelines.