Grace Toombs’ own experiences with the Australian health system led to her launching Australia’s first at-home cervical screening test kit. Now, part of Startmate’s accelerator program, she’s looking to raise more capital to revolutionise all aspects of women’s healthcare.
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When Grace Toombs was 14, her mother sat her down at the kitchen table and set out a number of collected condiments – barbecue sauce, Vegemite,
and a salt and pepper shaker – in a line.
“I thought, ‘What is she doing?’ It turned out that each condiment represented a woman in my bloodline – I’m a very proud Aboriginal woman – who had fought tirelessly for our rights as Indigenous people. These were strong, black women. And at the end of the line, she picked up the salt shaker and said, ‘This is you, and because of what came before you, you can do anything you want to do. So dream big, and go for it’.”
Toombs decided in that moment she wanted to help the most people she possibly could, and becoming a doctor seemed like the right way to do that. After graduating from university, she didn’t get into medicine right away but pursued a nursing degree for two years before re-applying to medicine in 2021, and starting her dream degree in 2022.
Around the same time, Toombs received an endometriosis diagnosis. (Endometriosis is a chronic condition where tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside of the uterus, and can cause pain, swelling and inflammation).
“It was the constant rigmarole of GP clinic to GP clinic, showing up at the emergency department for severe pain, missing exams or birthday parties – I felt so excluded from the world,” Toombs says. “I started to see all these fragmentations in the healthcare system. I kept thinking, ‘Something’s not right here’.” She left medicine to pursue public health, and around the same time, received a call from a gynaecologist doing a rotation at St Vincent’s Hospital.
“He said, ‘I’ve just looked over your file and I want to help you,” Tombs says. “It was the first time I’d had a clinician take me seriously.”
Toombs was booked in for a laparoscopic excision the following week, and during the surgery, her doctor performed a cervical screen (commonly known as a Pap smear). She was 21 at the time – four years before the recommended screening age – and was subsequently diagnosed with CIN 3, a high-grade, precancerous condition where the full thickness of the cervical surface layer is affected by severely abnormal cells.
At that moment, I thought, ‘I’m a privileged, young woman – a medical student – with high health literacy. I live in a major city, and I almost fell through the cracks’. What happens to the other women in Australia who don’t have that access? It really lit a fire in me.
At the time, Toombs was working for the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health (a population-based survey that explored the factors contributing to the health and wellbeing of over 57,000 Australian women), and those statistics were dire. Just 62% of women who were meant to get a cervical screening test did, and last year, 220 women died due to cervical cancer, which is 95% preventable with screening.
“I have a lot of conviction, and when something pisses me off, it really pisses me off. That became the seed of June.”
What followed was a tonne of market research, focus groups and six months of cold-calling labs to create Australia’s first at-home STI and cervical screening platform for women and people with a cervix.
“I would literally just rock up to pathology labs, knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, do you want to change the future of women’s healthcare? Yes or no?”
That persistence paid off. Toombs eventually partnered with Foresight Pathology, one of the country’s largest labs, and built a clinical team of GPs and specialists. “The healthcare system can be slow to change – people are often reluctant to try something new,” she says. “ But I handpicked an incredible crew to help sail the June ship forward.”
June Health is just six months old, but has a team of medical clinicians on board – including the gynaecologist who first diagnosed Toombs, Dr Kieran McCaffrey, as chief medical advisor – along with a large pathology lab on the east coast to collect samples from users and has gained paying customers in every state and territory. That last point, Toombs is particularly proud of.
“A lot of screening doesn’t reach places like the Northern Territory, so that’s been a key milestone,” she says.
The company was bootstrapped entirely by Toombs until she was accepted into Startmate’s 2025 winter cohort, which sees the incubator invest $120,000 into each start-up. That’s given Toombs the capital – and the guts – to go all-in full-time on June. By the time this publication hits the stands, Startmate’s Demo Day, where founders pitch their ideas to investors, will have taken place. Toombs hopes to have secured further capital – and is confident she will, given she’s already received interest from VC funds and angels.
That capital will help fuel June’s next major project: Australia’s first subscription-based endometriosis pain clinic. The start-up has so far recruited 50 women to take part in a pilot practice that will consist of clinical providers like gynaecologists, dieticians, naturopaths and psychologists, all accessible online. She hopes to reduce the time it takes to get a diagnosis “dramatically” (so far, it’s more than seven years).
“We’re in pilot mode and learning mode, but I envision this is a full wrap-around, comprehensive, tailored solution for women.” After that, Toombs hopes to make June synonymous with women’s health.“ When a woman closes her eyes and thinks to herself, ‘I need a doctor’s appointment to speak to someone about my sexual and reproductive health, I want them to think about June.”
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