The big data ecosystem is marching forward, constantly being shaped by the emerging players, as well as more established vendors spearheading the charge. The same can be said of the venture capitalists and investors that stand behind these startups, and the numbers are all there to back this up.

Last year ServicesANGLE editor Alex Williams picked up a study that pointed at a sum of around $350 million as the total capital raised by big data and NoSQL startups in 2011. That’s more than a 260 percent growth rate.

This week Ben Koehler of Beautiful Data published a sketch that (literally) connects the dots between some of the companies that attended the Strata big data conference and their backers. Accel Partners is quite active in this field – it sponsors Hadoop distributor Cloudera, and is also one of the investors of Couch Base and Facebook, which does a good deal of data analytics as well.

Talend’s own handful of investors include Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers. Lightspeed in turn has some money put on both DataStax and Cloudera competitor MapR, and it’s also associated with Pentaho.

While the VC community is buzzing over a portion of the big data ecosystem, many other developers are also advancing forward. Last year SiliconANGLE’s Klint Finley wrote up a list of the top five big data startups he expects to see some serious growth in 2012, and among them were Puppet Labs, Revolution Analytics and others, all of whom have their own angle on analytics.

Hadoop is growing very fast, and with it are other trends such as NoSQL and new technologies which aim to address the same issues via different means. The growing investor interest is one of the best indicators outlining this very rapid expansion.