Recession fears aren’t hurting the wishlist and shopping app GoWishwhich is hitting record numbers ahead of the 2025 holiday season. The app, which has north of 13.6 million registered users, had its best day this week when it hit No. 2 on the US App Store on Monday.
While GoWish has seen similar adoption trends in previous years, this year has proven to be successful. The app doubled the number of users from last year and has broken records with hundreds of thousands of new daily users in November.
In the US alone, the app has nearly 6.2 million users, while it has around 1 million in the UK In its home market of Denmark, the wishlist app has over 50% market penetration and over 3.5 million registered Danish users.
Although it operates as a technology 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”. (That’s Danish for “wish cloud.”) It was just a seasonal wish list gimmick, but its founders saw the potential to be more.
In 2020, GoWish was acquired by Danish VC Dotcom Capital, owned by founder Casper Ravn-Sørensen, who is also GoWish’s chief development officer, and his partner, CEO Mads Dahlerup. They created it 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 state-founded technology platform to go global as a proprietary scale,” Ravn-Sørensen told TechCrunch.
Consumers can use the app to create multiple wish lists for themselves, their family and friends and for different occasions. Wishes — or products you can buy from online retailers — can be added directly to your list by copying and pasting a URL, searching for a product, or browsing inspiration feeds containing 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 partner partnerships and more than 700 brand partnerships, many of which are now adding “GoWish” buttons to their own websites. That model has been successful, Ravn-Sørensen explained, as the app saw net profits after taxes of $1.7 million in fiscal year 2024, which are being reinvested in its growth. (GoWish declined to disclose its total revenue.)
The company attributes its increased adoption this year to its marketing on Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap. Snap even gave GoWish a shout out in its Q4 profits call, as he was one of Snap’s partners success stories.
“We are very good at optimizing marketing spend on digital platforms and this makes our global rollout very efficient,” said Ravn-Sørensen.
The company will later increase its experience with artificial intelligence, but is not yet sharing details about those plans.
“We have a mission to ‘fix gifts,'” noted Ravn-Sørensen, adding that GoWish wants to make “users’ dreams and wishes come true while giving double gifts and giving back 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.)
“However, in a longer trajectory, we want to be the ‘global genie’ of social markets, able to predict future consumer trends across generations,” he said.
The Copenhagen-based company is currently a 90-person team 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 for adding items to wish lists from your computer.
