Copenhagen's Good Tape raises €600k from Nordic Makers to complete management buy-out, Zendesk co-founder joins board

Good Tape, the Copenhagen-based AI transcription company, has raised €600k from Nordic Makers, an investment group founded by former unicorn founders that invests its own capital in early-stage Nordic startups, with an average ticket size of €500k.

Zendesk co-founder Alexander Aghassipour led the investment for Nordic Makers and has joined Good Tape’s board. Good Tape also announced that this round is part of a management buy-out in which the founders took over Zetland’s ownership stake, the Danish media outlet that incubated the startup. This makes Good Tape an independent company.

“There is so much uncertainty and scepticism around AI tools right now, that many people are getting too overwhelmed to use them effectively. We need to give people products that they don’t have to worry about, that still leverage the power of AI. Like being able to search and interact intelligently with years worth of interviews, in the way Explore allows,” said Aghassipour, co-founder of Zendesk and partner, Nordic Makers.

Founded in 2022, Good Tape began life as an internal tool at Zetland, the Danish member-funded newsroom, before spinning out as a standalone business. It was founded by journalists who needed accurate transcripts without handing over sensitive information to outside vendors.

It transforms spoken audio into usable text while keeping full control of customer data, holds ISO 27001 certification, is GDPR-compliant, stores data in the EU, and does not train AI models on customer material. Since spinning out, Good Tape has completed more than 15 million transcriptions in over 100 languages for journalists, researchers, lawyers, consultants, and public-sector teams.

The company says it is now used by 3 million people across more than 150 countries. With the buyout, co-founders Ýmir Gyðuson Gíslason and Lasse Finderup take control of Zetland’s stake in the company.

“Good Tape was built inside a newsroom by people who needed to trust where their interviews ended up. Zetland gave us the room to build it, and we owe them a lot. Now we’re going all in on that trust. With Explore, Good Tape goes from transcribing your interviews to also connecting them, and it’s still safe for your most sensitive material,” said Finderup, co-founder and CEO, Good Tape.

Alongside the ownership change, the company has launched Good Tape Explore, a new feature that links a user’s recordings together to surface patterns across past interviews. The new Explore feature connects each new recording to a user’s full transcription history, surfacing contradictions, shifting positions, and supporting arguments, with every insight linked back to the original recording.

Good Tape says the Explore tool will let journalists, researchers and teams trace what a source said and when, follow how their positions evolve across multiple recordings, while being within the same private, EU-hosted workspace.