GoWish’s shopping and wishlisting app is having its biggest year yet

Recession fears are not affecting wishlist 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 No. 2 on Monday in the US App Store.

While GoWish has seen similar adoption trends in previous years, this year has proven to be very successful. The app has doubled the number of users over last year, and broke records with hundreds of thousands of new users daily in November.

In the US alone, the app has approximately 6.2 million users, while it has around 1 million users in the UK. In the home market of Denmark, the wishlist app has over 50% market penetration and over 3.5 million registered Danish users.

Although it operates today 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”. (That’s Danish for “wish cloud.”) It was just a seasonal wish-list gimmick, but its founders saw the potential for it to be something more.

In 2020, GoWish was acquired by Danish VC Dotcom Capital, owned by founder Casper Ravn‑Sørensen, who is also GoWish’s chief growth officer, and his partner CEO Mads Dahlerup. They founded 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 tech platform to go global as a privately owned company,” Ravn Sørensen told TechCrunch.

Consumers can use the app to create multiple wish lists for themselves, their family and friends, and for different occasions. Wishlists — 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 our inspiration feeds of millions of products. When you’re ready to buy, you can click a button in the app to go directly to the retailer’s website.

The company has about 65,000 affiliate partnerships and more than 700 brand partnerships, many of which are now adding “GoWish” buttons to their websites. This model has been successful, Ravn Sorensen explained, as the app saw net after-tax profits of $1.7 million in its 2024 fiscal year, which is being reinvested into its growth. (GoWish declined to disclose its total revenue.)

The company attributes its increased adoption this year to the marketing it has been doing across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap. Snap even gave GoWish a shoutout in the fourth quarter Profits He called him, because he was a Snap partner Success stories.

“We are very good at optimizing our marketing spend across digital platforms and this makes our global rollout very effective,” Ravn-Sorensen said.

The company will later work to increase its experience with artificial intelligence, but it has not yet shared details about these plans.

“We have a mission to ‘fix the gifting process,’” Ravn-Sørensen noted, adding that GoWish wants to fulfill “users’ dreams and desires while making double gifting and returns a thing of the past.” (The app allows family and friends to reserve items on users’ wish lists so users don’t get the same gift from multiple people.)

“However, on a longer path, we want to become the ‘global genie’ of social shopping, who can predict future consumer trends across generations,” he added.

The Copenhagen-based company currently consists of a team of 90 people 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.