I think they don't have enough budget to list their coins in popular exchange like binance or kucoin to make an IEO.
Agree, it is all about funds to list the tokens. Most of the new projects are purely new ones that surely have small funds to provide IEOs. This is the main reason why they choose small exchanges with a bad reputation because they just spend low funds there. It is much different if they choose Binance, Bittrex, KuCoin, OKEx, or other top exchanges, they must spend a big amount of money.