GoWish, the Danish wishlist app, is valued at more than $200mn ater its last raising

GoWish has raised fresh funding at a valuation of more than $200mn, according to Bloomberg, which reported the round on Monday. The company is one of the more unusual businesses to come out of Copenhagen’s startup scene, not least because it did not start as a startup at all.

The app began life in 2015 as Ønskeskyen, or wish cloud, a seasonal promotional tool built by the Danish-Swedish postal operator PostNord. It let people make wishlists and share them with family before Christmas, which turned out to be a habit rather than a campaign.

Danish investor Dotcom Capital bought the app in 2020 and rebuilt it as a commerce business. In January 2025, the London private equity firm Capital D acquired roughly a third of the company in a deal whose value was never disclosed, with Dotcom Capital keeping the remaining two-thirds.

That ownership structure is worth noting because it makes GoWish a private-equity-backed business rather than a venture-funded one, which is a less common path for a Danish consumer app than the route taken by companies like the hardware startup Atech, which raised its pre-seed from Sequoia and a16z. The distinction matters for how patient the capital behind it is likely to be.

Growth since then has been steep by any measure. GoWish counted about 10 million registered users when Capital D invested, 13.6 million by November 2025, and more than 18 million by July of this year, with over nine million of those in the United States.

Its home market is close to saturated. Roughly 3.5 million Danes are registered, which is more than half the population, and the company reached number two on the US App Store during last November’s holiday rush.

The money comes from pointing that intent at retailers. GoWish runs around 65,000 affiliate partnerships and more than 700 direct brand relationships, and it has since built a Global Commerce Media division around a product it calls Wish Signals, which packages what people are adding to their lists as demand data.

The scale of that signal is the pitch. GoWish recorded 194 million wishes in 2024, representing €10.7bn of cumulative buying intentions, which is a figure it is careful to describe as intention rather than revenue.

The accounts show a company that has chosen growth over profit. Gross profit edged up to DKK 72.5mn in 2025 from DKK 70.1mn the year before, but a DKK 11mn profit in 2024 became a DKK 6.2mn loss, with DKK 29.2mn going into research and development and headcount passing 100.

Neither the size of the new round nor the identity of the investors has been independently confirmed, and GoWish has not published either. A valuation above $200mn on gross profit under DKK 75mn implies buyers are pricing the user base and the data rather than the current income statement.

“Wishlists say something about who we are and what we dream about,” chief executive Mads Dahlerup said in July, when the company relaunched its visual identity. Board chairman Rich Waterworth described the American share of the user base as truly exceptional, which is the part of the story investors are most likely to be paying for.

Whether wishlists survive as a category is the open question, given that the platforms GoWish depends on for discovery are steadily absorbing the same function, with Alibaba already wiring its models into end-to-end agentic shopping on Taobao. A list of things someone wants is valuable precisely because it is hard to infer, and several very large companies are now trying to infer it anyway.

For a European consumer app, though, raising anything at this stage of the cycle counts for something, with capital concentrating hard into a handful of very large deals and consumer businesses well down the queue behind AI infrastructure. The next real test arrives in November, when the app finds out whether last year’s holiday spike was a season or a floor.