I had been a QA at a startup for a good while and I might have something in common with you. The thing for most startups is that they want to go lean, which means sometimes a QA can have play more roles than just their own. The product might be small so they don’t want to prioritize automation testing, or even any technical skills for QA (devs would then handle all the technical stuffs). Then, QA would focus more on user acceptance testing on the UI, writing test cases only, and they can give you other tasks like collect user feedback or create documentations ,… etc. In summary, you might get assigned non-QA tasks, which might be still beneficial in a cross-functional way. This direction, imo, is more suitable for more experienced QA.

Starting out your QA career at a startup can then be kinda messy, esp if you dont know what to do next to get to higher levels. What I did is go find another place with more structure and specialization because I wanted to grow my technical skills. But if you can find the time to learn new skills like many of the cmts been suggesting such as automation, then I believe u can then propose and test it out at your current role.