The little engines that CAN. These projects have some awesome devs behind them but lack the funding to have a big marketing campaign.

XTRABYTES (XBY) did not do an ICO but is a rescue project from a failed coin. It was abandonned by the original devs but got picked up by some community members who refused to let their investment go to waste. They managed to attract some very competent devs and are building a highly secure superfast codeagnostic platform that will solve the current issues of scalability and centralisation current platforms are struggling with. They are filing patents which should enter pending state any day now.

Spectrecoin (XSPEC) had an unsuccessful ICO but did not let that get to them, they continued developping on very low funding and managed to pump out some awesome tech. They are developping a privacy coin that has features you won't find with any other privacy coins, features that make them more interesting than the other privacy coins and not just fancy bells and whistles. They have successfully integrated TOR and OBFS4 support into their coin and are working on a wallet that allows stealth staking. They are also the first, and to my knowledge the only, privacy coin which successfully bypassed the great firewall of china.