MANILA, Philippines -- Global Gateway Venture Capital (G2VC) is investing P200 million in a local start-up company, according to founder and managing director Winston Damarillo.

This new investment adds to Morph Labs and Exist Software, which were started by Damarillo and partly funded by G2VC.

"We will soon launch this semi-incubated firm," Damarillo said, declining to identify the company pending negotiations.

The start-up specializes on Web 2.0 applications designed using Ruby on Rails, an open source programming language.

"It will serve to complement our platform strategy with Morph and Exist," Damarillo said in an interview with INQUIRER.net.

Exist has been providing customized software services for foreign clients and has lately focused on developing Web-based applications. Morph Labs, meanwhile, has built its so-called "platform-on-a-service", meant to accommodate application developers.

"Our investment will provide additional capital for product development as well as marketing," Damarillo said. G2VC's focus is on open-source and Web-based software or referred to as "software-as-a-service."

He added G2VC is also looking at putting investments that cater to the gaming industry, particularly Web-based development anchored on open-source.