Founded in 2010 and based in San Francisco, Wish operates an ecommerce marketplace geared toward bargain shoppers seeking low-cost items. The company reported that its revenue doubled in 2018 versus the prior year. Wish recently launched Wish Local, a program to partner with brick-and-mortar retailers to enable local pickup of purchased items. The firm intends to use new funding for marketing and working capital and to expand its merchant footprint in Europe and North America. It also plans to invest in improving logistics to support growth. Total lifetime capital raised now amounts to $1.6 billion, per Crunchbase. Wish is a mobile commerce application focused on the “value shopper,” surfacing thousands of low-cost items from hundreds of merchants via a tailored mobile experience. Many of the merchants on Wish are made in China and overlap with Alibaba merchants targeting western consumers. The company was founded by former Google, Yahoo and Facebook employees Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang and has grown rapidly over the past five years. Prior to this round Wish had raised more than $75 million; in June of last year it announced a $50 million round. At the time of that June round Wish reported 31 million active users and more than 10,000 merchants on the platform. TechCrunch and Forbes coverage emphasize continued growth and ongoing capital raises as part of the company’s expansion. Wish is a social shopping site and mobile application that presents products in a highly visual, Pinterest-like format while using algorithms and machine learning to adapt to users’ tastes. The company was launched by former Google, Yahoo and Facebook employees Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang. Wish reports 31 million active users and about 10,000 merchants on its platform, charging a 15 percent transaction fee. Its mobile app regularly ranks in the Top 200 Overall on the iTunes App Store and is a top 10 shopping app on Android. The company has focused on value shoppers and on connecting retailers from sites like Alibaba with a Western mobile audience, and around half of its market is split between Europe and North America. To date Wish has raised $80 million, including a newly announced financing that updates its capital position. Wish is a mobile-first shopping app that personalizes a product feed using natural language processing and machine learning, and treats wishlists as merchant intent data. Users can add items to lists and the platform learns preferences to surface more relevant products; the company has also expanded this technology to users' closets. Wish focuses on price-sensitive or "value-shopper" audiences and targets merchants on sites like Alibaba to reach Western mobile consumers. The startup reports more than 25 million users across 50 countries, about 30 million signals per day, and repeat customers account for roughly half of purchases. Founders Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang launched the company from teams at Google, Yahoo and Facebook, and the company is pursuing international expansion, particularly in Europe, North America and via Chinese retailers. Wish operates a wishlist-making shopping app that personalizes product feeds using NLP and machine-learning to learn user intent from lists, recommendations, and saves. The app surfaces highly targeted offers to users and lets merchants run promoted sales through an AdWords-like, self-serve ads platform. Wish captures intent from Wishlists and takes a 10–30% cut of promoted sales it manages. The product has seen strong engagement: over 12 million users, 5–10 million items added to Wishlists daily, 250K product recommendations, and users saving an average of 19.3 items per day. The app ranks in the App Store (No. 28 in iOS Lifestyle) and has five-star ratings on iOS and Android. Investors and advisors quoted in the article, including Jerry Yang, highlight the company’s core recommendation technology and mobile-commerce potential.

Total raised

$871M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series H

Latest activity

Aug 2019