Elliephant and Wilderlands: pioneering collaboration for sustainability

Hannah McLean
Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP)
4 min readJul 4, 2023

In the fast-paced world of entrepreneurship, forging partnerships that align with your core values can be a game-changer. But finding common ground and a shared culture is not always as easy as waiting for our next Netflix episode to load (sigh).

That is, of course, the case unless you’re part of the Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP)

Earlier this year, we shared a celebratory acknowledgment of the collab that took place between two of our 2018 MAP alumni — Acusensus and Atticus. Acusensus, a pioneering AI-based traffic enforcement solutions provider (aka ‘road safety boss’) made a historical milestone at MAP as our first alum to list on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Their collaboration with Atticus, a leading legal technology company (aka ‘document efficiency boss’), played a crucial role in streamlining their document review and verification processes.

2018 MAP cohort. Source: MAP

The year 2023 has brought on even further cohort collaboration, with a recent spotlight honing in on the awesome partnership between Elliephant and Wilderlands, two startups from our 2023 MAP cohort.

Joining forces through the alignment of their commitment to sustainability, Wilderlands has now been included as a gifting option for Elliephant customers.

“As part of our commitment towards promoting ethical and sustainable practices, we have incorporated a ‘Gift For Good’ feature into our platform. This allows gift recipients to opt for a charitable contribution instead of a traditional gift, supporting various causes we care about.” — Sheree Andersen, Co-Founder of Elliephant.

Elliephant Co-Founders: Sheree Andersen (left) and Johnny Reid (right)

For any of you new to our 2023 MAP space, Elliephant is a MAP startup that assists organisations with gifting at scale. They’re pretty much the go-to platform if you’re wanting to remove all the time, anxiety and stress involved in corporate gift-giving. You may also be wondering why their name is Elliephant. Fun fact: elephants have a really good memory, and essentially Elliephant’s offering means you’ll never miss an important date or milestone ever again (big wins!).

Stoked with forming this natural synergy (not just in name compatibilities), Heath Evans, Co-Founder of Wilderlands, reflects on the collaboration:

“Since launching Wilderlands, we’ve been inundated with requests to use our biodiversity units as gifts for people passionate about protecting the planet, but it wasn’t until meeting the Elliephant team that we saw how quickly we could offer this to the corporate world at scale.”

With a vision of protecting and preserving our planet, Wilderlands has built a platform that makes it easy for anyone to start protecting our Australian biodiversity today. Think of it like buying one square metre of vulnerable land and knowing that your contribution has just become the catalyst for preserving and safeguarding our biodiversity for generations to come. I don’t know about you, but it certainly doesn’t seem like there are many gift options on the market that gives you the opportunity to leave a long-lived legacy! Run don’t walk…

Wilderlands Co-Founders: Ash Knop (left), Paul Dettmann (middle), and Heath Evans (right)

But to bring the spotlight back to MAP (because I still have my brand awareness KPI goals to check off), it’s pretty clear that the MAP cohort effect really is something special. And if you won’t take my word for it, check out what else Heath had to say:

“When we joined MAP, we never dreamed that we’d find such incredible opportunities to collaborate with other teams and have been so grateful for the way the founders have been really looking for ways to support each other and we can’t wait to see how this grows.”

Team Wilderlands and Elliephant together. Source: Photoshop

To wrap things up, we couldn’t go without some final words from Jaxon Hickey, MAP’s Accelerator Manager (aka accelerator boss):

“Seeing multiple examples of MAP teams from the same cohort come together to form strong partnerships is pretty damn exciting. Going forward, it would be great to see our next example of a MAP collaboration stretch beyond their immediate cohort and see alliances form right across the decade-old community MAP has been building. This is what we are actively working towards right now.”

Which team collab will be next? I’m thinking a bit of PHORIA (2014 MAP alum) and My Better Sleep (2023 MAP startup) as a chance to lean into the idea of immersive tech being used to enhance sleep solutions? Guess you’ll just have to be following us on our MAP socials to be the first to find out if it comes about:
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