NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Healthcare giants like Johnson & Johnson (Charts) and Medtronic (Charts) are not the only companies battling to solve the riddle of your aching lower back.

Venture capital firms pumped $315 million dollars into spine-related startup companies last year, up from $124 million in 1998, according to Dow Jones VentureOne. They're all battling for a piece of a market that Banc of America Securities pegs at $3 billion dollars worldwide.

One of the most compelling small companies in this burgeoning space is NuVasive (Charts), which boasts blue-chip backers, a pristine pedigree, and an intriguing product pipeline.

The San Diego-based company, incorporated in 1997, has developed a suite of innovative devices that promise to make back surgery easier for surgeons and less invasive for patients, reducing time spent in both the operating room and in the hospital.

For example, NuVasive markets an innovative technique for spinal fusions, a common back procedure where two or more spinal vertebrae are fused together. (Hundreds of thousands of fusions are done each year in the United States.)

NuVasive's XLIF procedure comes at the spine via the patient's side, rather than the more traditional approaches through the abdomen (anterior) or the back muscles (posterior.)

This lateral approach, the company claims, reduces muscle tissue disruption and can decrease time spent in the operating room from as much as 180 minutes to 90, while the typical hospital stay declines from two to three days to one.

"You can do a fusion and patients can go home the next day," says Frank Phillips, a professor of orthopedic surgery at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago who specializes in minimally invasive back surgery.

In conjunction with XLIF, NuVasive also offers tools that give surgeons a better look at the surgical site, including a proprietary "nerve avoidance system" that can reduce the chance of serious nerve injury.

All this means potential cost savings for hospitals. The Providence Medford Medical Center in Medford, Oregon, reported a 20 percent cost savings after adopting the full range of NuVasive's surgical products. In the second quarter alone, NuVasive trained 151 surgeons to use its devices, and it expects to train about 475 this year at its recently-expanded training facility in San Diego.

In addition to surgeons, NuVasive has also gotten investors excited - in the past two years its Nasdaq-traded stock has doubled, from just under $10 to nearly $20.

"Spine surgery is on the cusp of really starting to explode," says NuVasive CEO Alex Lukianov, who was recruited by Kleiner Perkins, one of NuVasive's financial backers, to head the company. Lukianov previously was president of Sofamor Danek USA, a spine-focused medical device firm now owned by Medtronic. Most of NuVasive's senior management, in fact, spent time at Sofamor Danek, which pioneered many of the devices and hardware used by back surgeons today.

Looking ahead, one of NuVasive's most exciting products is the NeoDisc, a "cervical nucleus replacement device" for use in the neck. Unlike artificial spinal disks, which replace the entire disk, the NeoDisc works by replacing only the spongy inner nucleus. If you can imagine your disk as a jelly donut, the NeoDisc would pump it back up with jelly. (Disks are the spine's shock absorbers.)

"While several companies are working on artificial disks, NuVasive could be one of the first to market with a nucleus replacement device," says Banc of Americas Securities analyst Steven Lichtman, whose bank has done investment banking work with the company.

In late June NuVasive received the go-ahead to start enrolling patients in a clinical trial for NeoDisc. FDA approval could come as early as 2010. Back doctors could use the NeoDisc as a bridge between conservative, non-surgical treatment - chiropractic, say, or physical therapy - and more invasive spinal fusion or total disk replacement.

"Before, you had fusion and disk replacement [to treat] degenerative disks," says Rush's Phillips "But what can we do early on when it's mild to prevent it? Now there is technology targeting the earlier stages of disk degeneration. The belief that we can intervene early on is a very new trend."

Of course, the introduction of a device like the NeoDisc also expands the "patient population," so to speak, which means more procedures and thus more sales for NuVasive. Not that it needs much help there: Deloitte & Touche USA named NuVasive the fastest-growing technology company in North America last year, based on five-year (2000-2004) revenue growth of 73,752 percent. Last year NuVasive generated $61.8 million in revenue, and it earns tidy gross profit margins of over 80 percent on those sales.

Sales should exceed $90 million this year and could really take off in the next few years if the company is successful in launching an artificial lumbar disk for the lower back. NuVasive's disk is also implanted laterally. (Artificial disks on the market today are implanted through the abdomen.) The company launched nine new products in 2005, and should equal that amount this year.

"What they are doing right at NuVasive is continued innovation," says Lichtman. Which is good news for your aching back.