Copenhagen-based AI transcription company Good Tape has secured an undisclosed investment from Nordic Makers and launched Explore, a product designed to uncover connections across years of recorded interviews.

Alexander Aghassipour, co-founder and former Chief Product Officer of Zendesk, led the investment on behalf of Nordic Makers and has joined Good Tape’s board. The financing formed part of a management buyout that made Good Tape independent from Zetland, the Danish newsroom where the platform originated.

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From Newsroom Tool to Independent Company

Good Tape began as an internal tool developed by Zetland journalists who wanted accurate transcriptions without exposing sensitive interviews to unnecessary third parties.

Led by co-founders Ýmir Gyðuson Gíslason and Lasse Finderup, the platform has since grown to three million users across more than 150 countries. According to the company, it has processed over 15 million transcriptions in more than 100 languages for journalists, researchers, consultants, lawyers and public-sector organisations.

As part of the management buyout, Finderup acquired majority ownership and purchased Zetland’s stake, meaning the media company is no longer a shareholder. Finderup said Good Tape’s previous ownership structure had made raising external investment difficult.

The company has not disclosed the value or structure of Nordic Makers’ investment.

Explore Turns Transcripts Into Searchable Memory

Explore represents Good Tape’s expansion beyond standalone transcription. The product connects each new recording with material previously transcribed by the user, creating a searchable context layer across an entire archive.

It can identify earlier statements that appear to contradict or support a new interview, surface recurring subjects and locate relevant comments from other sources. Every result includes the source transcript and timestamp, enabling users to review the original recording before using the material.

Users can apply Explore to an individual recording, a project or their complete archive. They can also ask questions, extract relevant quotations, generate potential angles and create projects containing every recording associated with a particular subject.

The company is initially positioning the product for journalists, researchers and other professionals whose work depends on recalling information across large numbers of conversations.

Building Organisational Memory With User Control

Good Tape also wants Explore to help organisations retain knowledge when interviews and recordings are distributed across different employees or projects.

Shared archives could allow journalists to discover relevant statements gathered by colleagues, creating what the company describes as an organisational memory. However, Good Tape acknowledges that newsrooms will need controls over who can access interviews, particularly when recordings contain confidential or unpublished material.

Transcripts remain private by default, and users must choose when to share them. Access can subsequently be revoked, while even team owners cannot automatically inspect the contents of a user’s files.

Explore does not replace editorial judgment. Journalists must still assess whether an older statement remains relevant, whether its original context has been preserved and whether a source should be contacted before publication.

Privacy Remains Central to the Platform

Good Tape says Explore operates under its existing privacy and security framework without introducing additional subprocessors.

The company stores and processes customer information inside the European Union, complies with GDPR and holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification. Recordings, transcripts and account content are encrypted and are not used to train Good Tape’s models or third-party AI systems.

These protections are particularly important for customers working with sensitive material. Good Tape’s users include Human Rights Watch and other organisations whose teams may investigate the same subjects over extended periods.

Moving Beyond Transcription

Good Tape’s expansion reflects the increasing commoditisation of speech-to-text technology. Rather than competing solely on transcription accuracy, the company is developing tools that help users retrieve, verify and act on information contained within their recordings.

The platform already provides speaker labelling and is developing voice fingerprinting to reduce the need to identify recurring speakers manually. Its Recorder application simplifies audio capture, while a Model Context Protocol connection allows customers to work with their Good Tape material through AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot.

Explore is available at no additional charge during its introductory period. Good Tape says it plans to introduce a paid subscription after the launch phase, with the product page listing a future price of €10 per month or €8 per month when billed annually.

The new investment will support Good Tape as it develops this broader product strategy and operates independently following the management buyout.

Portuguese InsurTech startup FRANK has raised €2.9 million in a funding round led by Armilar and Start Ventures to further develop its AI-powered operating platform for insurance brokers.

The company will use most of the capital to advance and train its technology, strengthen support for brokerage clients and prepare for international expansion while consolidating its position in Portugal.

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Reducing Administrative Work for Insurance Brokers

Founded by António Castro, Ricardo Vallejo and Alexandre Silva, FRANK is addressing the administrative workload involved in insurance brokerage.

Processes such as requesting home insurance quotes, updating customer information and following up on claims often require brokers to move between email, messaging applications and multiple insurer portals, each with different procedures and data requirements.

FRANK says brokers can spend as much as 80% of their working time on back-office activities rather than advising clients.

“Brokers need to be freed from operational work so they can focus on risk advisory and on their clients, bring more insurance literacy to consumers, and help protect people better,” said Castro, co-founder and CEO of FRANK.

An AI Operator for Insurance Workflows

FRANK has developed an AI Operator that performs administrative tasks across the systems and portals used by insurance brokers.

The virtual assistant connects with communication channels including email and WhatsApp, reads submitted documents and identifies the insurance process being handled. When information is missing, it alerts the broker before proceeding.

The technology can then access the appropriate insurer platforms, enter the required data and return the result to the broker. This could include a new insurance quotation or an update regarding the progress of a claim.

By automating actions across different systems rather than only organising information, FRANK aims to reduce repetitive manual work while allowing brokers to retain oversight of customer interactions and decisions.

More Than 350 Brokerages Use FRANK

FRANK began commercially offering its platform less than 12 months ago and is now used by more than 350 insurance agencies and brokerages in Portugal, representing over 1,500 individual users.

The company says its technology processes approximately 70,000 back-office tasks each month. Brokers using the platform report saving an average of around ten hours of administrative work per person every week.

This early adoption has given FRANK a base from which to improve its product and train its technology on the workflows commonly encountered by insurance professionals.

Preparing for International Expansion

FRANK plans to invest the new funding in research and development as it expands the capabilities of its AI Operator. It will also strengthen customer support for insurance agencies and brokerages already using the platform.

The company intends to consolidate its position in Portugal before entering international markets in 2027. Expanding outside its domestic market will require the platform to adapt to different insurance products, regulatory environments and insurer systems.

The €2.9 million round gives FRANK additional resources to develop that infrastructure and test whether its automation model can be applied across other insurance markets.

Berlin-founded infrastructure startup Restate has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by European venture capital firm Singular, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Capital One Ventures.

The investment brings Restate’s total funding to $27 million. The company plans to use the capital to accelerate product development, recruit additional engineers and build its commercial presence in the United States, including expanding its operations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Building Reliable Infrastructure for AI Agents

Restate develops infrastructure intended to make distributed backend applications, workflows and AI agents more reliable.

AI agents increasingly operate across multiple services, databases and external tools. When a process crashes, times out or loses its connection, developers may need to rebuild the logic required to determine what has already been completed and where the application should resume.

Restate’s durable execution technology records the progress of an application and allows interrupted processes to continue without unnecessarily repeating completed actions. The platform is designed to handle failures, retries, state and communication between services automatically.

This enables developers to focus on application logic while Restate manages much of the underlying infrastructure needed to keep long-running and multi-step processes operational.

“Durable execution solved an important problem: it made individual processes reliable,” said Stephan Ewen, co-founder and CEO of Restate.

“But software is increasingly made up of services, agents, workflows and state that all need to stay reliable as they interact. We believe durability has to become a property of the infrastructure itself.”

From Backend Applications to AI Workflows

Restate positions its technology as an infrastructure layer for applications ranging from conventional distributed backends to autonomous AI agents.

Unlike systems that treat durable execution as a separate workflow service, Restate is designed to make reliability available as a building block within existing applications. Its open-source runtime can be self-hosted, while Restate Cloud provides a managed version of the platform.

The technology is intended for processes where failure could create duplicated transactions, lost data or incomplete workflows. Potential applications include payment processing, order management, account operations and AI agents that perform multiple actions across different services.

Restate says its platform is already used by hundreds of companies, including Fortune 500 businesses.

Founders Built Apache Flink

Restate was founded in 2024 by Stephan Ewen, Igal Shilman, Till Rohrmann and Ahmed Forghal.

Ewen, Shilman and Rohrmann previously worked together on Apache Flink, an open-source stream-processing technology used to support real-time data applications across banking, software-as-a-service and digital media.

Forghal previously held engineering and leadership roles at technology companies including Stripe and Meta.

The founders are applying their experience in distributed systems to the reliability challenges created by increasingly interconnected software and AI applications.

Expanding Restate’s US Presence

The Series A will support Restate’s engineering roadmap as the company develops additional tools for AI agents and backend systems.

Restate will also invest in its go-to-market organisation and expand its presence in San Francisco, bringing the company closer to existing and prospective customers in the United States. The startup currently operates with teams in Berlin and San Francisco.

The company’s expansion comes as businesses experiment with AI agents capable of completing multi-step operations rather than only generating content or answering questions. These applications require infrastructure that can maintain state, recover from failures and coordinate actions across different services.

With the new capital, Restate aims to establish durable execution as a standard infrastructure component for both AI-powered applications and conventional backend systems.