Copenhagen’s Good Tape raises €600k and becomes independent from Zetland; Zendesk co-founder joins board

Good Tape is a Copenhagen-based AI transcription company that has raised €600,000 from the investment group Nordic Makers. Alexander Aghassipour, co-founder of Zendesk and partner at Nordic Makers, led the investment and joined the board of directors. The funding round is part of a management buyout that allows the founders, Ýmir Gyðuson Gíslason and Lasse Finderup, to take over the ownership stake previously held by Zetland, the Danish media outlet that originally incubated the startup. This buyout makes Good Tape a fully independent company.

Founded in 2022 by journalists looking for secure transcription methods, Good Tape turns spoken audio into text while maintaining data privacy. The service complies with GDPR, holds ISO 27001 certification, stores data within the European Union, and does not use customer material to train AI models. The platform currently serves three million people across more than 150 countries, having completed over 15 million transcriptions in more than 100 languages for professionals such as journalists, researchers, lawyers, consultants, and public-sector teams.

Alongside the funding and independence, Good Tape released a new feature called Good Tape Explore. This tool connects a user's transcription history together to find patterns, track how sources change their positions over time, and surface contradictions across multiple recordings, with every insight linked to the original audio. The feature operates within the same private, EU-hosted workspace designed to protect sensitive material.