Sameer Maskey is the founder and chief executive of Fusemachines, an AI development and consulting company in New York, New York, that he started in 2013. A speech and language researcher who grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, he is known for training AI engineers in places large technology companies rarely recruit, through the Fusemachines AI Fellowship.
From Bates College to IBM Research
He came to the United States to study mathematics and physics at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, then earned his PhD in computer science at Columbia University in 2008, advised by Julia Hirschberg (Columbia Computer Science). He worked as a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center on a speech-to-speech translation project funded by DARPA, and has taught statistical methods for natural language processing and programming for entrepreneurs at Columbia as an adjunct professor (Columbia SIPA). He has written more than 20 peer-reviewed papers (Fusemachines).
Teaching Engineers in Kathmandu
Maskey has said he started Fusemachines “with the notion that talent is everywhere but opportunities are not” (Voices in AI). In the early years he trained the company’s engineers himself, at times spending up to 80% of his working hours teaching in Kathmandu or over Skype, often before dawn in New York. In 2017 Fusemachines began offering AI fellowships in Kathmandu and chose 27 fellows from more than 400 applicants for the first group (Columbia Computer Science). The program later ran in the Dominican Republic, New York, Rwanda and Burkina Faso.
Taking Fusemachines Public
In October 2025 Fusemachines completed its merger with CSLM Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, and began trading on Nasdaq under the symbol FUSE, with Maskey continuing as chief executive and a director (Fusemachines).