I'm head of engineering at a local kiosk company (www.advancedkiosks.com) and we are doing fun things with very little resources! We recently implemented Google MediaPipe for presence detection. That was fun. We use custom printed microcontroller boards to control certain peripherals like LED strips and fans. We design in 3D print our own brackets. Things like that. The job requires a lot of creativity and knitting together of technologies. Pretty good fun. Beats writing yet another distributed CRUD SaaS app...though we do have a couple of those. I don't know if my employer qualifies as a startup, but we're pretty small and doing cool things.