Recession fears haven’t hurt wishlist and shopping app GoWish, which is posting record numbers heading into the 2025 holiday season. The app, which has more than 13.6 million registered users, had its best day of the week, taking the No. 2 spot in the U.S. App Store on Monday.
GoWish saw similar hiring trends last year, but this year has proven to be a breakthrough success. The number of users on the app has doubled since last year, and in November it broke records with hundreds of thousands of new users every day.
The app has around 6.2 million users in the US alone and around 1 million in the UK. In its home market of Denmark, the Wish List app has a market penetration of over 50% with over 3.5 million registered Danish users.
Although it now operates as a technology company, GoWish has a unique origin story.
The app was originally launched as ‘Ønskeskyen’ in 2015 by PostNord, the national postal service of Denmark and Sweden. (It means “cloud of wishes” in Danish.) It was just a seasonal wishlist gimmick, but the founders thought it could become something more.
In 2020, GoWish was acquired by Danish VC Dotcom Capital. Dotcom Capital is owned by founder Casper Ravn‑Sørensen, who is also GoWish’s chief growth officer, and his partner CEO Mads Dahlerup. They spun it out as an independent technology company and created an international version of Ønskeskyen (the name of the app in Denmark and Norway).
“We may be the first nation-based technology platform to go global as a privately owned scale-up,” Ravn Sørensen told TechCrunch.
Consumers can use the app to create multiple wishlists for themselves, family and friends, and for different occasions. You can add wishes (or products available for purchase from online retailers) directly to your list by copying and pasting URLs, searching for products, or browsing our inspiration feed featuring millions of products. When you’re ready to buy, you can tap a button within the app to go directly to the retailer’s website.
The company has approximately 65,000 affiliate partnerships and more than 700 brand partnerships, many of which have now added “GoWish” buttons to their websites. Ravn Sørensen explained that the model was successful as the app recorded a net profit after tax of $1.7 million in fiscal year 2024, which was reinvested in growth. (GoWish declined to disclose total revenue.)
The company attributes this year’s increase in hiring to the marketing it’s doing across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap. GoWish is one of Snap’s partner success stories, which is why Snap praised GoWish during its fourth quarter earnings call.
“We are very good at optimizing marketing spend across digital platforms, which makes our global reach very effective,” said Ravn Sørensen.
The company plans to enhance its AI experience later, but has not yet shared details of its plans.
“We are on a mission to ‘fix gifting,'” Ravn Sorensen said, adding that GoWish “wants to make double gifting and returns a thing of the past, while realizing the dreams and hopes of our users.” (The app allows family and friends to reserve items on your wishlist, so you don’t receive the same gift from multiple people.)
“But in the longer-term trajectory, we want to become the ‘global genie’ of social shopping, able to predict future consumer trends across generations,” he said.
The Copenhagen-based company currently has a team of 90 people and is backed by London-based private equity firm Capital D, which acquired a third of the company in early 2025. The rest is owned by Danish VC Dotcom Capital.
GoWish is available for iOS and Android and provides a Chrome extension for adding items to your wishlist from your computer.
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