Recession fears aren’t hurting the wish list and shopping app GoWish, which 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 yet this week, when on Monday it hit No. 2 on the U.S. App Store.

While GoWish has seen similar adoption trends in previous years, this year has proven to be a breakout success. The app doubled the number of users from last year, and it has been breaking records with hundreds of thousands of new daily users in the month of November.

In the U.S. alone, the app has nearly 6.2 million users, while it has around 1 million in the U.K. In its home market of Denmark, the wish list app has over 50% market penetration and over 3.5 million registered Danish users.

Though today it operates as a tech 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, 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 Ønskeskyen (the app’s name in Denmark and Norway).

“We might be the first state-founded tech platform to go global as a privately-owned scale-up,” 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 the inspiration feeds that feature 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 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, explained Ravn‑Sørensen, as the app saw net profits after tax of $1.7 million in its 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 the marketing it’s been doing across Meta, TikTok, Google, and Snap. Snap even gave GoWish a shoutout on its Q4 earnings call, as it’s been one of Snap’s partner success stories.

“We’re very good at optimising our marketing spends across digital platforms and that makes our global roll-out very effective,” Ravn‑Sørensen said.

The company will later augment its experience with AI, but isn’t yet sharing details about those plans.

“We have a mission of ‘fixing gifting’,” noted Ravn‑Sørensen, adding that GoWish wants 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 users won’t receive the same gift from multiple people.)

“Yet, on a longer trajectory, we want to become the ‘global genie’ of social shopping, that can predict future consumer trends across generations,” he said.

The Copenhagen-based company is currently a team of 90 and is backed by Capital D, a London-based private equity firm that bought one-third of the company in early 2025; the rest is owned by the Danish VC Dotcom Capital.

GoWish is available on iOS and Android and offers a Chrome extension to add items to wish lists from your computer.

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