GoWish uses Google Cloud AI and GKE to transform its platform, doubling its user base, and automating product discovery.
GoWish uses Google Cloud AI and GKE to transform its platform, doubling its user base, and automating product discovery.
Building a scalable platform to make wishes come true
The support from the Google Cloud team is invaluable and helps us innovate at speed. There's a level of proactivity that we've never experienced from other cloud providers. If there's a challenge, it's taken seriously, so it's like the team is there with us, every step of the way.
Nikolaj Borg-Hass
CTO, GoWish
Buying the perfect gift can be a challenge. Wish lists can guide shoppers to the right product, but these lists are typically scattered across different retailer sites, leading to a fragmented shopping experience. This makes it difficult to coordinate gifting with other buyers, with duplicate purchases and returned products often the inevitable result. That's the challenge GoWish set out to solve. Its single, centralized platform allows users to save, share, and manage all their wishes in one place, helping shoppers buy the perfect present every time.
GoWish's mission to make wishes come true has fueled rapid growth, particularly in the US, where its user base has already exceeded that of its native Denmark. With ambitions to double its user base to +17 million by the end of 2025, GoWish needed to build a powerful new platform that could easily manage a growing catalog of over two billion products.
To do so, the company needed a cloud provider built for global scale and rapid innovation that could support growth, all while handling the platform's large, seasonal spikes in traffic.
GoWish chose to build its new platform on Google Cloud. This was both for its global reach and the tight integration between its data and AI ecosystem, which would give GoWish the agility to develop new features quickly. Just as important, though, was the relationship with the Google Cloud team.
"Choosing Google Cloud was about more than just the technology," explains Nikolaj Borg-Hass, CTO of GoWish. "The support from the Google Cloud team is invaluable and helps us innovate at speed. There's a level of proactivity that we've never experienced from other cloud providers. If there's a challenge, it's taken seriously, so it's like the team is there with us, every step of the way."
Redefining product discovery with Gemini and Vertex AI
To help shoppers find the right gifts on its new platform, GoWish set out to redefine product discovery. With billions of products added through raw URLs, the system needed an efficient way to categorize every item. Previously, products were only seen as unique, siloed links, which limited GoWish's ability to understand the overall, real-time demand for specific item types.
To solve this challenge, the team built an AI-powered product aggregation layer with Google Cloud. This layer groups hundreds or thousands of similar product links into AI-generated "GoWish products," which represent a specific concept (such as red and white men's sneakers) rather than a single store link. Now when a shopper views a specific wish on a user's list, they instantly see a product profile enriched with accurate details, showing them exactly what the user wants.
With Gemini creating and then evaluating SEO-optimized product descriptions, we've seen products rise to the top of search rankings just days after being indexed, ensuring customers get the products they're looking for.
Nikolaj Borg-Hass
CTO, GoWish
Grouping products together in this way also enables GoWish to recommend alternative items to shoppers if the original product is out of stock.
Using the multimodal capabilities of Gemini, GoWish is now able to analyze and classify product information using images and text descriptions from source URLs. GoWish uses Gemini Embedding 001 and its multimodal features to generate dense vector embeddings, which act as the unique digital fingerprint for the "GoWish products," accurately identifying, categorizing, and grouping together billions of individual links. Vertex AI and Vector Search then use these embeddings to create highly relevant and efficient search indexes, enabling customers to use natural language to describe exactly what they want.
To execute this complex process at speed and scale, GoWish built a fully automated data pipeline, running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which provides the scalability and stability to handle significant traffic fluctuations, as well as efficiency using Gemini.
"With Gemini creating and then evaluating SEO-optimized product descriptions, we've seen products rise to the top of search rankings just days after being indexed, ensuring customers get the products they're looking for," Borg-Hass explains.
This automated process has enabled GoWish to generate up to 600,000 new "GoWish products" a week. What's more, by tracking wishes for these categorized products in BigQuery, GoWish can identify emerging consumer preferences, allowing them to predict future trends for their users and advertising partners.
Defining the shopping experience of the future with Veo 3
Google Cloud has been key to driving our growth globally, while giving us the insights, tools, and building blocks to experiment and build with AI. This has allowed us to innovate quickly and redefine our sense of what's possible.
Nikolaj Borg-Hass
CTO, GoWish
With a stable, scalable foundation in Google Cloud and an advanced product discovery engine, GoWish successfully doubled its user base from five million to 10 million in the first year after re-launching the platform in 2023.
Next, GoWish plans to make the shopping experience even more intuitive for customers. It's exploring the use of Gemini 2.5 Flash to generate realistic visualizations of products, such as seeing an appliance in a user's kitchen or virtually trying on clothing, to make it even easier for customers to make wishes come true.
For Borg-Hass, Google Cloud is not only the infrastructure supporting GoWish in its rapid growth, but a technological enabler, empowering the company to create features to delight customers and cement its role as a world-leading product-discovery platform.
"Google Cloud has been key to driving our growth globally, while giving us the insights, tools, and building blocks to experiment and build with AI," adds Borg-Hass. "This has allowed us to innovate quickly and redefine our sense of what's possible."
GoWish is a global digital wishlist and social shopping platform that lets users create, share, and track gift lists from any online store. Launched in Denmark, it now helps 12 million users globally to find the ideal gifts.
Industry: Retail
Location: Denmark
Products: Google Cloud, BigQuery, Gemini, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Veo 3, Vertex AI
