Copenhagen’s Good Tape Raises €600,000 as It Completes Management Buyout

Copenhagen-based Good Tape has raised €600,000 from Nordic Makers as part of a management buyout that makes the AI transcription company independent from Danish media outlet Zetland. Alexander Aghassipour, co-founder of Zendesk and partner at Nordic Makers, led the investment and has joined Good Tape’s board.

Founded in 2022 by journalists Lasse Finderup and Ýmir Gyðuson Gíslason, Good Tape began as an internal tool at Zetland. The founders built it to create accurate transcripts while keeping sensitive interview material under the customer’s control. Finderup currently serves as CEO, while Gíslason is CTO.

Good Tape converts spoken audio into searchable text and is designed for journalists, researchers, lawyers, consultants and public-sector teams. The company is ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant, stores data in the European Union and says customer material is not used to train its AI models. Since its launch, the platform has processed more than 15 million transcriptions across more than 100 languages and is used by around 3 million people in over 150 countries.

Alongside the financing and ownership change, Good Tape has launched Explore, a new feature that connects a user's recordings across their transcription history. It can surface patterns, contradictions, changing positions and supporting arguments, while linking each insight back to the original recording. This allows users to investigate what was said across multiple interviews without moving their sensitive material outside the platform.

The management buyout transfers control of Zetland’s stake to Good Tape’s founders and marks a new phase for the company as an independent business. Nordic Makers, which invests its own capital in Nordic startups, typically invests between €500,000 and €1 million in early-stage B2B software companies.

With the new capital and its independent structure, Good Tape is positioning itself beyond transcription alone, focusing on turning accumulated recordings into a private, searchable knowledge base for professionals working with interviews, meetings and other spoken content.