Inducted: 2018

BS in Business Administration, 2012

Sarah E. Sanders, the college’s first recipient of the Distinguished Young Alumni Award, is co-founder and co-CEO of NATIVE, an AgTech startup empowering local farmers to meet the rising demand for local, traceable food.

Sanders began her career working in hospitality at the Tavern Restaurant Group, a family-owned business started by her father in Lexington. Sanders’ passion for the food and beverage industry has been apparent since a young age, but during graduate school she began to focus on technology and sustainability. Upon completing her MBA in 2014 she joined Rubicon Global, a cloud-based platform for waste and recycling services now valued over $1 billion, where she worked for the CEO, Nate Morris, managing investor relations efforts through multiple rounds of fundraising. After tremendous company growth she transitioned to recruiting to create Rubicon’s first SMB (small-to-medium-size business) and mid-market sales teams.

In 2017, she joined Toast, a cloud-based point-of-sale system now valued at $1.4 billion. She relocated to New York City to aggressively grow Toast’s market share in the iconic Manhattan restaurant scene.

In April 2019, Sanders was invited to attend the first ever Forbes Under 30 Global Women’s Summit in Israel. She also was recruited to attend Summit Los Angeles in November 2018 with 2,500 of the brightest emerging global entrepreneurs and participated in the Forbes Under 30 Summit in Boston in 2016, 2017 and 2018. In 2019, she took the Founders Pledge to donate 10 percent of her entrepreneurial earnings to charities that provide access to clean water and vision care. She also founded a scholarship, which will annually award a college student committed to studying for a career in sustainable agriculture.

Sanders earned her undergraduate degree in business management from the University of Kentucky and her MBA in international business from Xavier University.