Maker of Ojibwe language games among finalists for prestigious Minnesota Cup

Tony Drews wanted to find a fun way to teach the Ojibwe language, so he developed interactive card and board games.

The former Anoka-Hennepin educator founded Nashke Native Games in 2023 to sell them — already generating $200,000 in sales — and is one of this year’s finalists for the Minnesota Cup competition.

“These games instill confidence and pride in our Native youth. These games unlock some of the cultural knowledge that has been kept from our people ... and changes the trajectory of our cultural loss,” said Drews, who grew up on Leech Lake and whose grandmother was sent to a Pipestone boarding school in the 1920s that forbade students from speaking their native languages.

The 12 games are sold to tribes, students, institutions and schools from Minnesota to Michigan and Canada.

“Language holds the culture of our people and gives us the understanding of who we are,” said Drews, adding that he’d like to help restore what was lost.

On Monday, Drews and eight other finalists will participate in a mini-trade show and a “Shark Tank”-like business story pitch session. At the end of the night, they will find out who takes home the $50,000 grand prize.

The Minnesota Cup, the state’s largest entrepreneurial contest, had 1,000 applicants this year. Each of the nine finalists received $25,000.

“It’s exciting,” said Kailin Oliver, associate director of the contest that was founded 20 years ago by the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

Drews saw the contest as an opportunity and participating has been “a complete blast,” he said.

Any prize money will help pay to produce more inventory of existing Nashke games and launch five more.

“This would help us invest in our business a little bit,” he said.

Last year’s winner was the clean-energy startup Carba, which converts carbon dioxide into a neutral charcoal-like substance.

This year, among the newly hatched companies gunning for the grand prize are Loon Liquors Distillery, payment tech firm Mozrt, Heart Failure Solutions, the Japanese beetle extermination firm Alure, and SignalGrab, a new app startup that helps colorblind drivers properly identify traffic signals.

Another finalist, Revitri, based in Willernie, makes a concrete and plastic additive composed of lightweight and hollow beads made from recycled glass.

Talknician in St. Cloud uses the expertise of soon-to-be retirees to develop highly automated workforce-training videos and manuals for factories that risk losing huge swaths of intellectual knowledge due to retirements.

Momease Solutions in Plymouth makes a higher-yielding, breast pumping bra. Three years ago, owner Ashley Mooneyham was a new mom. She designed her pump to include both heat and massage after struggling to effectively pump breast milk while working full time.

It’s the third time Mooneyham has entered the Minnesota Cup contest and her first time as a finalist. But she already has received attention. She won the $30,000 grand prize at last year’s Hy-Vee Opportunity Summit competition in Minneapolis. In November, the firm won a $288,000 federal grant that helped design and test the effectiveness of a prototype.

If Mooneyham wins the Minnesota Cup, the money will go toward research and development, with the goal of clinical testing at the University of Minnesota with 100 new mothers, she said.

Momease and any of the other finalists could easily become the next big company to sprout from the state of Minnesota. They just need support, Oliver said.

According to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, an average of 6,585 new businesses sprouted each year in the state between 2008 and 2019. As of 2023, the U.S. Small Business Administration reported that Minnesota was home to 525,000 small businesses, 80% of which had no employees.