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This week my Evernote is bursting with stories about Russian and eastern European startups. So here we go.

Deal flow

A large funding round of Russian business marketplace B2B Center was announced today. PE firms and Runa Capital bought a minority stake in the company for $45 million.

Seedcamp and 500 Startups invested in Latvian Repairy, which appears to be a straight-forward cloud service which helps auto repair shops streamline their business processes from registering incoming orders to ordering spare parts.

Russian interactive air screen developer DisplAir has raised undisclosed seed round from a number of investors.

EWDN reports that “Siri for Android” Speaktoit, a mobile app that allows to interact with Android phones via voice command has raised an undisclosed round of funding from Intel Capital. Speaktoit is also a resident of Skolkovo IT Cluster.

Product launches

Yandex incubator Yandex.Factory launches social commerce app SocialMart, which will use APIs of its comparison shopping service Yandex.Market. SocialMart is available on Facebook and VK.

News reviews

In Russia a new law may restrict foreign investors’ ability to back large Internet companies, or enable those companies to go public on foreign stock exchanges. The law is currently being reviewed by the legislators.

Based on Facebook IPO results, its analog in Russia VK has postponed its IPO indefinitely (curiously VK  has collected over 16,000 Facebook likes).

Croatian Farmeron and Estonian Erply featured in the Wired story about startup accelerators.

Jennifer L. Schenker of Informillo has compiled her own list of hottest Russian startups (where I would equate a word “startup” with “Internet company”). This is basically Runa Capital’s portfolio and a few more names from Forbes’s list.

With a tagline “Chat, flirt, love” Lithuanian Eskimi, a social network for users of feature phones continues to grow in Nigeria, Ghana, Vietnam and Indonesia as reported by Arctic Startup. It now boasts 7 million users.

Also on Arctic Startup is a review of Latvian infografics development tool Infogr.am.

We and TechCrunch wrote about SlickFlick deal with Getty Images. Read here or here.

Events

Russian 42Conf has been covered by the Next Web. Alas I missed the event.

Romanian VentureConnect’s pitching session took place this week. It saw presentation from BlueSeed, the visa-free startup community on the ship, which has PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel as a backer and a Romanian Dan Dascalescu as a co-founder. Makan Studios presented its palette generator app which extract colors from photos. For more names, read VentureConnect blog.

That’s it. Just a few more hours left this week to be productive.

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