diff --git a/src/deepsparse/sentence_transformers/__init__.py b/src/deepsparse/sentence_transformers/__init__.py
index 338a9f5dba..44c53314c5 100644
--- a/src/deepsparse/sentence_transformers/__init__.py
+++ b/src/deepsparse/sentence_transformers/__init__.py
@@ -33,4 +33,4 @@
     )
 
 
-from .sentence_transformer import SentenceTransformer
+from .sentence_transformer import DeepSparseSentenceTransformer, SentenceTransformer
diff --git a/src/deepsparse/sentence_transformers/sentence_transformer.py b/src/deepsparse/sentence_transformers/sentence_transformer.py
index c3454148d5..5e2dbd0855 100644
--- a/src/deepsparse/sentence_transformers/sentence_transformer.py
+++ b/src/deepsparse/sentence_transformers/sentence_transformer.py
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
 DEFAULT_MODEL_NAME = "zeroshot/bge-small-en-v1.5-quant"
 
 
-class SentenceTransformer:
+class DeepSparseSentenceTransformer:
     """
     Loads or creates a SentenceTransformer-compatible model that can be used to map
     text to embeddings.
@@ -289,3 +289,6 @@ def mean_pooling(
         return torch.sum(token_embeddings * input_mask_expanded, 1) / torch.clamp(
             input_mask_expanded.sum(1), min=1e-9
         )
+
+# for backwards compatibility
+SentenceTransformer = DeepSparseSentenceTransformer