Bora Mandic '25 wins statewide entrepreneurship competition

SPA senior Bora Mandic ’25 has been named the winner of the Youth Division of this year's MN Cup, a program of the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. The MN Cup is an annual competition that reaches emerging entrepreneurs from across the state and connects them with education, mentorship, and resources to launch and accelerate the development of their new ventures. Bora won the competition's Youth Division with his SignalGrab app, a machine-learning-powered mobile app for drivers that audibly alerts users of the traffic signals ahead. Bora's award comes with a $10,000 prize to continue work on his project, which he originally developed last year as part of SPA's Advanced Technology Projects course. 

Bora learned about the MN Cup competition in 2023, while searching for ways to secure funding for another of his projects, BrikShare, which makes educational toys more accessible to kids through a LEGO lending program for libraries. Bora entered BrikShare in the 2023 MN Cup competition and advanced to the seminfal round. "I got to see firsthand how useful the competition was for creating a detailed plan, including business models, financial plans, and pitch decks, to get the program into the hands of the people who need it," says Bora, who then decided to submit SignalGrab to the MN Cup in 2024.

Over the course of the spring and summer, Bora created pitches, videos, and business and financial plans for SignalGrab while getting a lot of practice with public speaking and presenting. His work paid off when he was named the winner of competition's Youth Division in September 2024. He also notes that the one-two spots in the division were all SPA students, with SPA ninth-grader De-An Chen '28 taking second place in the division with his Geo-Game business.

Dr. Kate Lockwood, Director of Computer Science and Engineering and teacher of SPA's Advanced Technology Projects course, says it has been exciting to see the evolvement of SignalGrab. "Bora has done such a fantastic job on every step of SignalGrab: constructing a training set of images, the final app design, evaluation, and presenting in multiple public forums," Kate says, "this project required a wide range of technical, research, and communication skills and Bora excelled at all of them. To see him win this award with the MN Cup is a huge accomplishment and so well deserved."