Late in an interview about his SaaS product for the oil and gas industry, Steve Taylor began to describe bringing in artists on his staff to enhance the software development process.

Taylor is the CEO of radient360, the St. John’s startup that announced a $3.3 million funding round from Build Ventures and Killick Capital last week. He thinks deeply and with originality about the management of his four-year-old company, and that outside-the-box mentality may be one reason the company is on track to record 1,500 percent revenue growth over two years.

A case in point: Taylor knew he had artists on staff so he proposed collaborating on an oil painting with the theme of “the original Newfoundland risk-taker.” He envisaged fishermen in a dory, putting their lives on the line to catch fish that they couldn’t see but believed were beneath the surface. It meshed well with the idea of entrepreneurship, he thought.

The result was a painting by admin staff member Mel Patey titled, “Thro' Spindrift Swirl, and Tempest Roar”. She collaborated with several staff members to produce the work, which now hangs in the radient360 office near the St. John’s airport.

“We wanted to find out, how is art influencing the product and the user experience?” said Taylor. “We think you lose something if you only focus on the technology.”

Taylor says the creative process encourages his development team to come up with better products. They are now meant for an industry rarely associated with the arts – the oil and gas sector. The product helps to simplify workflow processes in the industry, where there are often vast amounts of data that are inaccessible to workers in the field. Radient360 allows executives in an office and workers in the field to communicate and access all the information they need, and updates data in real time. That can lead to 40 to 60 percent cost savings.

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Taylor said the number of customers is now “in the 10ish range”, but the company is extracting increasing revenue from its client base. It increased revenues 500 percent this past year, and the team expects 300 percent growth next year.

Unlike most other Software-as-a-Service companies, radient360 books its customers for an extended period of time, which allows it to introduce customers to a range of services and extract value from each contract. He said the company is “just getting started” in sales to petroleum companies.

In three to five years, radient360 hopes to bring its core technology to other industries with similar requirements, such as utilities, mining and logistics. “The oceans supercluster is very interesting to us because it is a way for us to find players we can collaborate with,” said Taylor.

The company now has 35 employees, and Taylor believes that number will grow. He said he looks for employees who embrace the three core values in the company’s culture – empathy, truth-seeking and value-creation. These traits help employees not only work well with one another but also to perform better when dealing with clients. If the employees can empathize with customers’ pain, he said, they do a better job of selling to customers, and that helps to move more of the company’s technology. And radient360 is on a mission to get its tech out to customers.

“Technology is like ripe fruit,” he said. “It’s only ripe for a certain period of time and you better make sure you move it while it’s ripe.”