Recession fears are not impacting the wish list and shopping app GoWish, which is seeing record numbers ahead of the 2025 holiday season. The app, which has more than 13.6 million registered users, had its best day yet this week when it reached number two on the U.S. App Store on Monday. While GoWish has seen similar adoption trends in previous years, this year has proven to be a breakout success. The app doubled its number of users from last year and has been breaking records with hundreds of thousands of new daily users in the month of November.
In the United States alone, the app has nearly 6.2 million users, while it has around 1 million in the United Kingdom. In its home market of Denmark, the wish list app has over fifty percent market penetration and more than 3.5 million registered Danish users.
Though it operates as a tech company today, GoWish has a unique origin story. The app was originally launched in 2015 by the Danish-Swedish national postal service PostNord as “Ønskeskyen,” which is Danish for “wish cloud.” It began as just a seasonal wish list gimmick, but its founders saw the potential for it to become something more. In 2020, GoWish was acquired by Danish venture capital firm Dotcom Capital, which 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 tech company and created an international version of the original app. One founder noted they might be the first state-founded tech platform to go global as a privately-owned scale-up.
Consumers can use the app to create multiple wish lists for themselves, their family, and friends for different occasions. Products can be added directly to a list by copying and pasting a URL, searching for a product, or browsing inspiration feeds that feature millions of items. When ready to buy, a user can tap a button in the app to go directly to the retailer’s website.
The company has around 65,000 affiliate partnerships and over 700 brand partnerships, many of which are now adding GoWish buttons to their own websites. This model has been successful, as the app saw net profits after tax of 1.7 million dollars in its fiscal year 2024, which are being reinvested in its growth. The company declined to disclose its total revenue.
The company attributes its increased adoption this year to marketing across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap. Snap even gave GoWish a mention on its fourth quarter earnings call, as it has been one of Snap’s partner success stories. The company stated they are very good at optimizing marketing spends across digital platforms, which makes their global roll-out very effective.
The company will later augment its experience with artificial intelligence but is not yet sharing details about those plans. The company’s mission is focused on fixing gifting, aiming to make users’ dreams and wishes come true while making double-gifting and returns a thing of the past. The app lets family and friends reserve items on users’ wish lists so they will not receive the same gift from multiple people. On a longer trajectory, the company wants to become the global genie of social shopping, predicting future consumer trends across generations.
The Copenhagen-based company is currently a team of 90 people. It is backed by Capital D, a London-based private equity firm that bought one-third of the company in early 2025. The rest of the company is owned by the Danish venture capital firm Dotcom Capital. GoWish is available on iOS and Android and offers a Chrome extension to add items to wish lists from a computer.