Recession fears aren’t hurting the wish list and shopping app Goshwhich 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 of the week, hitting No. 2 on the US App Store on Monday.
While Gosh has seen similar adoption trends in previous years, this year has proven to be a breakout success. The app doubled the number of users it had last year, and it’s breaking records with hundreds of thousands of new daily users in the month of November.
In the US alone, the app has around 6.2 million users, while its home market of Denmark has around 1 million in the UK, the wish list app has over 50% market penetration and over 3.5 million registered Danish users.
Although today it operates as a tech company, Gosh has an original story.
The app was originally launched in 2015 by the Danish-Swedish national postal service Post Nord under the name “Anskiscan”. (That’s Danish for “wish cloud.”) It’s just a seasonal wish list trick, but its founders saw its potential for something more.
In 2020, Gosh was acquired by Danish VC.com Capital, owned by founder Kasper Raun-Serensen, who is also Gosh’s Chief Growth Officer, and his partner, CEO Mads Dahlrup. They spun it off as an independent tech company and developed an international version of Anskiscan (the app’s name in Denmark and Norway).
“We may be the first state-owned tech platform to go global at the scale of private ownership,” Ravin-Saranson told TechCrunch.
Users can use the app to create multiple wish lists for themselves, their family and friends, and for various occasions. Desires. 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 about 65,000 affiliate partnerships and more than 700 brand partnerships, many of which are now adding “gosh” buttons to their websites. The model has been successful, Rawan-Serenson explained, as the app has seen a net profit after tax of $1.7 million in its 2024 fiscal year, which is being reinvested in its growth. (Gosh declined to disclose his total earnings.)
The company attributes its growing adoption this year to marketing to Mita, TechTalk, Google and Snap. Snape even gave Gosh a shout-out on his Q4 Income Call, because it’s one of Snape’s companions Success stories.
“We’re very good at optimizing our marketing spend across digital platforms and that makes our global rollout very efficient,” said Ravin-Serenson.
The company will later expand its experience with AI, but is not yet sharing details about those plans.
“We have a mission of ‘fixing gifting,'” noted Ravin-Serenson, adding that Govish Double Gifting “aims to fulfill the dreams and desires of consumers and bring back the past.” (The app lets family and friends save items on users’ wish lists so users can receive the same gift from multiple people.)
“Still, on a long-term trajectory, we want to be the ‘global genie’ of social shopping, able to predict future consumer trends across generations,” he said.
The Copenhagen-based company currently has a team of 90 and is backed by London-based private equity firm Capital D, which bought a third of the company in early 2025. The rest is owned by Denmark’s VC.com Capital.
Gosh is available on iOS and Android and offers a Chrome extension to add items to wish lists from your computer.