Good Tape raises fresh funding and launches Explore to uncover stories buried in old interviews

Good Tape has landed fresh backing from Nordic Makers and used the moment to launch a product that pushes it beyond plain transcription. The Copenhagen company says 3 million people in more than 150 countries use its service, and it has now passed 15 million transcriptions. That’s a lot of audio turned into text. But the bigger move is that Good Tape is trying to turn all that text into memory.

The new feature is called Explore. It sits on top of everything a user has already transcribed and connects new recordings to earlier ones, surfacing changed opinions, contradictions and supporting arguments. Each result points back to the original recording, so the user can check what was actually said and when. For journalists, researchers and other teams juggling long-running subjects, that means old interviews stop being dead files and start becoming a usable archive.

That idea comes straight out of Good Tape’s origin story. The company began as an internal tool at Zetland, the Danish member-funded newsroom, because journalists there didn’t want to send sensitive interviews to outside services. It was led by co-founders Ýmir Gyðuson Gíslason and Lasse Finderup, and over time it spread well beyond journalism to consultants, lawyers and public-sector teams. Finderup says transcription was always going to become commodity software, which is probably right; the real question was what comes after the transcript.

The answer, for now, is context. Good Tape is also pushing speaker labelling and working on voice fingerprinting so people won’t have to identify speakers by hand. It has simplified the front end too, with a Recorder app built around a “big red button” workflow and a path into tools like Claude, Copilot and GPT. That’s very on-brand for AI products right now: keep the first step stupidly easy, then hope the harder parts feel inevitable.

There’s also a corporate reshuffle behind the product launch. Nordic Makers’ investment was part of a management buyout that made Good Tape independent, with Finderup taking majority ownership and Zetland no longer an owner. Finderup says the old spin-out structure had become a blocker when the company tried to raise outside money. The deal was done on his wedding day, which is exactly the sort of detail that makes startup life sound glamorous right up until you remember the paperwork.

Good Tape isn’t charging for Explore at first, and it seems to know that the hard part is adoption, not pricing. The company wants users to have a few “wow” moments before it asks for money. That’s sensible. Tools like this live or die on whether people trust them enough to make them part of real work, especially when the work is sensitive and the archive is messy.