Sameer Maskey

Founder & CEO Fusemachines (Nasdaq: FUSE)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Dr Sameer Maskey is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fusemachines, a global enterprise AI company he started in 2013 and took onto the Nasdaq Global Market in October 2025. Fusemachines sells AI solutions built on its proprietary AI Studio and AI Engines to healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing and government customers across North America, Asia and Latin America. What distinguishes it is the premise underneath: Maskey’s view has always been that the binding constraint on enterprise AI is not algorithms or compute but trained engineers, and that the people capable of doing the work are distributed far more widely than the industry’s hiring is. So Fusemachines built AI education and fellowship programmes in places like Nepal and Latin America and made them the company’s own talent pipeline — a social mission and a supply chain at once. Maskey is himself the proof of the argument: he grew up in Kathmandu, took a PhD at Columbia, and invented speech-translation algorithms at IBM’s Watson Research Center. He still teaches at Columbia as an Adjunct Associate Professor.

Career Highlights

• Founded Fusemachines in 2013 and has led it as Chief Executive Officer throughout.
• Took the company public through a business combination with CSLM Acquisition Corp that closed on 22 October 2025, with shares and warrants trading on the Nasdaq Global Market as FUSE and FUSEW from 23 October 2025.
• Built a global enterprise AI business spanning healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing and government across North America, Asia and Latin America, on the proprietary AI Studio and AI Engines platforms.
• Created AI education and fellowship programmes aimed at underserved communities, making AI talent development in Nepal and Latin America the company’s own recruiting pipeline.
• Invented statistical algorithms for speech-to-speech translation and question answering at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center.
• Published more than twenty papers in international conferences and journals, with nine granted or pending patents.
• Teaches at Columbia University as an Adjunct Associate Professor, with courses including statistical methods for natural language processing and programming for entrepreneurs.
• Served as session chair and committee member for the leading computational linguistics and speech conferences, including ACL, NAACL, COLING, HLT, ICASSP and Interspeech.

Professional Journey

Maskey grew up in Kathmandu and came to the United States for university, taking undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics at Bates College in Maine. He then went to Columbia University for a PhD in computer science, working in natural language processing at a point when the field was still dominated by statistical rather than neural methods.

After the doctorate he joined IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center as a research scientist, where he developed statistical algorithms for speech-to-speech translation and question answering. That is research-lab work at the frontier of what was then possible, and it gave him an unusually clear view of the gap between what the research community could demonstrate and what an ordinary enterprise could deploy.

He founded Fusemachines in 2013 to close that gap, and made a bet that shaped everything after. Enterprises did not lack AI ideas; they lacked people who could implement them, and the competition for the small pool of credentialed AI engineers had made that pool unaffordable. Maskey’s answer was to build the engineers rather than bid for them — running AI education programmes and fellowships in Nepal, Latin America and other regions the industry ignored, and hiring from them. The result is a company whose social mission and commercial model are the same activity, which is rare and is the reason the company describes itself in terms of accessibility as much as capability.

Over the following decade Fusemachines layered proprietary product on top of the services business, building AI Studio and a set of AI Engines to make deployments repeatable across verticals rather than bespoke each time. The customer base spread across healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing and government, on three continents.

In 2025 the company went public. It combined with CSLM Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company, closing on 22 October 2025, and began trading on the Nasdaq Global Market as FUSE the following day, with Maskey as CEO, Christine Chambers as CFO, and a board including Bharat Krish, Tim Gocher, Sanjay Shrestha and Salman Alam. Maskey marked the moment by pointing at the distance travelled — from ideating with a small team to a Nasdaq listing.

The public-market period since has been demanding. In January 2026 Nasdaq notified the company that it did not meet the $15 million minimum market value of publicly held shares required for continued listing, and a further notice concerned the $50 million minimum market value of listed securities, with a cure period running to 23 September 2026. The company has disclosed both in its Form 8-K filings. Its stated plan for 2026 rests on four pillars: vertical product innovation focused on retail and real estate, organic growth through sales and marketing investment, partnerships with global resellers and systems integrators, and selective acquisitions.

Throughout, Maskey has kept his academic footing. He has taught at Columbia as an Adjunct Associate Professor alongside running the company, which is consistent with a career in which the research and the business have never been separate things.

Education

Columbia University

Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science

Bates College

Bachelor of Arts, Mathematics and Physics