Recession fears don't hurt your wish list and shopping app GoWishwhich is seeing record numbers ahead of the 2025 holiday season. The app, which has north of 13.6 million registered users, had its best day ever this week when it shot to No. 2 in the U.S. App Store on Monday.
While GoWish has seen similar adoption trends in previous years, this year has been a breakout success. The application doubled the number of users compared to last year and broke records – in November there were hundreds of thousands of new users per day.
In the US alone, the app has almost 6.2 million users, while in the UK it has around 1 million. In its home market of Denmark, the wishlist app has over 50% market penetration and over 3.5 million registered Danish users.
Although today it operates as a technology company, GoWish has a unique origin story.
The app was originally launched in 2015 by the Danish-Swedish national postal service PostNord as “ønskeskyen”. (It's Danish for “wishing cloud”). It was just a seasonal bucket list gimmick, but its founders saw the potential to be something more.
In 2020, GoWish was acquired by Danish VC Dotcom Capital, which is owned by founder Casper Ravn-Sørensen, who is also GoWish's chief development officer, and his partner, CEO Mads Dahlerup. They launched it as an independent technology company and created the international version of Ønskeskyen (the name of the application in Denmark and Norway).
“We may be the first state-owned technology platform to achieve global reach through a private venture,” Ravn-Sørensen told TechCrunch.
Consumers can use the app to create multiple wish lists for themselves, their family and friends, and for various occasions. Wishes – products you can buy from online stores – can be added directly to your list by copying and pasting the URL, searching for the product, or browsing inspiration sources with millions of products. When you're ready to buy, you can tap a button in the app to go directly to the retailer's website.
The company has approximately 65,000 affiliate partnerships and over 700 brand partnerships, many of which are now adding “GoWish” buttons to their own websites. This model has proven to be a success, Ravn‑Sørensen explained, as the app reported net after-tax profits of $1.7 million in fiscal year 2024, which are reinvested in its development. (GoWish declined to disclose its total revenue.)
The company attributes its surge in popularity this year to marketing across Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap. Snap even praised GoWish in its Q4 profits call, because it's one of Snap's partners success stories.
“We are very good at optimizing our marketing spend on digital platforms, which makes our global rollout very effective,” Ravn-Sørensen said.
The company will expand its AI experiences later, but is not yet sharing details about those plans.
“Our mission is to 'fix the gift-giving problem,'” Ravn-Sørensen noted, adding that GoWish wants to fulfill “users' dreams and wishes while making double gifts and returns a thing of the past.” (The app allows family and friends to reserve items on users' wish lists, so users don't receive the same gift from multiple people.)
“But in the long run, we want to become a 'global genius' of social shopping that will be able to predict future consumer trends across generations,” he said.
The Copenhagen-based company currently has 90 employees and is backed by Capital D, a London-based private equity firm that bought a third of the company in early 2025; the rest is owned by Danish VC Dotcom Capital.
GoWish is available on iOS and Android and offers a Chrome extension that allows you to add items to your wishlists from your computer.
