Copenhagen-based AI transcription startup Good Tape has raised €600,000 from Nordic Makers and used the round to complete a management buyout from its former owner, Danish media company Zetland — becoming a fully independent company for the first time. The Good Tape funding round was led by Zendesk co-founder Alexander Aghassipour, who has joined the startup’s board.
FAKTA
- Amount raised: €600,000 from Nordic Makers, an investment group of former unicorn founders with an average ticket of around €500,000.
- Lead investor: Alexander Aghassipour, co-founder and former chief product officer of Zendesk, who now joins Good Tape’s board.
- The deal: The round financed a management buyout in which co-founders Ýmir Gyðuson Gíslason (CTO) and Lasse Finderup (CEO) bought out Zetland’s stake; Zetland is no longer an owner.
- The company: Founded in 2022 as an internal tool at Zetland; now used by 3 million people in more than 150 countries, with 15 million transcriptions completed in over 100 languages.
- New launch: “Explore”, a feature that connects a user’s recordings and surfaces contradictions, changed opinions and supporting arguments, each linked to the original recording.
From newsroom tool to independent company
Good Tape began life inside Zetland, the Danish member-funded newsroom, where journalists needed accurate transcripts without handing sensitive interviews to outside vendors. The company’s tech lead, Jakob Steinn, then working in Zetland’s IT department, built the core of what became the product after hearing reporters complain about the hours lost to manual transcription.
The two co-founders, Ýmir Gyðuson Gíslason and CEO Lasse Finderup, both journalists, spun it out as a standalone business in 2022. But the old ownership structure became a barrier: as Finderup put it, “when we wanted to raise investment, it became clear that we couldn’t really do that as a spin-out because no one wanted to invest in that.” The management buyout solved the problem — with Finderup taking majority ownership — in a deal that, as it happens, closed on his wedding day.
How the Good Tape funding will be used
The €600,000 round will accelerate enterprise feature roll-out, grow the product development teams and support international expansion, according to the company. Good Tape says demand is coming from journalists, researchers, consultants, lawyers and public-sector teams — and it names Human Rights Watch among its customers, where privacy is critical.
Trust is the startup’s main differentiator in a crowded transcription market. Good Tape holds ISO 27001 certification, is GDPR-compliant, stores data in the EU and commits not to train AI models on customer material. Aghassipour said the appeal was a product people can rely on without anxiety: “We need to give people products that they don’t have to worry about, that still leverage the power of AI.”
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Transcriptions completed | More than 15 million |
| Languages supported | Over 100 |
| Users worldwide | 3 million across 150+ countries |
| Security certifications | ISO 27001, GDPR-compliant, EU data storage |
Explore: from transcription to memory
Alongside the funding, Good Tape launched Explore, a context layer that connects every new recording to everything a user has transcribed before. If a source contradicts something they said two years earlier, or an expert supports what a colleague heard, Explore surfaces it and links each insight back to the original recording.
“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,” said Finderup. “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.”
The feature is free for now — the company says it wants users to experience the “wow” moment before pricing it. Future ambitions include real-time use, so an interviewer could be told mid-conversation that a politician once said something different. For more founder and startup coverage, visit Watan News.
Conclusion
Good Tape’s €600,000 round is small by startup standards, but it completes a journey from newsroom side-project to independent company — with a Zendesk co-founder on the board and a product that turns interview archives into searchable institutional memory. For two journalist-founders who started by fixing their own transcription headaches, independence was the point all along.
