A biomedical start-up that uses artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy of antibody drug discovery, and a robotics start-up that developed a solution allowing non-technical users to programme robots easily.

These tech firms numbered among the top winners of the third annual Singapore Digital Techblazer Awards yesterday.

The awards recognise Singapore's best in tech innovation, and are jointly organised by the Infocomm Media Development Authority and SGTech.

This year's awards drew more than 400 submissions across three categories, up from 304 last year.

From these, seven companies and four student projects emerged as the winners.

Hummingbird Bioscience was the top winner for the Most Promising Innovation category.

The firm's chief scientific officer Jerome Boyd-Kirkup said: "The traditional antibody discovery process involves a lot of trial and error, and can be lengthy and inefficient. Our platform uses AI to predict how and where to target drug treatments to more precisely engineer drugs and get the best possible outcome."

The top winner in the Student Techblazer category was simplified robotics start-up Augmentus, which was founded by National University of Singapore (NUS) undergraduates in 2019.

The company's solution allows users to draw on an iPad the paths they want an industrial robot, such as a robotic welder, to take.

This could potentially shorten a weeks-long process involving copious amounts of code and design files to a matter of minutes.

Augmentus co-founder and chief operating officer Daryl Lim, who is a final-year economics and computing undergraduate at NUS, said: "Winning the award gives us the validation that you don't have to stop at just being a student. You can do so much more."

Lester Wong