Muhammad Saquib Malik is the chief technology officer and cofounder of ModulusTech, a Karachi company that manufactures steel framed homes in flat packs and ships them to site on a truck. A small crew assembles them with hand tools. By the company's account the result is a house in a day, at a fraction of the carbon of a brick and concrete one.
Of the three civil engineering students who founded the company at NED University, Saquib is the one who owns the product. The website lists him as chief technology officer and cofounder, and he has held the technical title since the company's earliest press, when ProPakistani called him chief technical officer in April 2018. He is often credited as Mohammed Saquib or M. Saquib.
His job has two halves. One is engineering: a structural system that works, that can be built safely by non specialists, and that can be made in a factory. The other is persuasion, because most Pakistanis assume a proper house is built of brick and mortar. This profile is about both, and it is honest about where the evidence stops.
A final year project and a friend's backyard
The Express Tribune, reporting on the first house in April 2017 in an article ModulusTech has since republished, said Saquib, Yaseen Khalid and Nabeel Siddiqui developed the design as a final year project. They were moved, the paper reported, by the destruction in Syria and by displaced families in Pakistan. Siddiqui said they wanted to build something tangible that could be used in the real world.
The early months were improvised. The paper said the founders paid for the first unit from their own savings, money from their parents and the sale of personal belongings, and built it in a friend's backyard with hired labourers. They bought the wrong materials for a large share of the budget and the walls failed during construction; the retailer took the materials back, which the founders said saved them more than Rs 50,000. Their professors doubted the three could finish in time to graduate, though one became a mentor.
Sponsors who gave goodwill and no money
The same report had Saquib describing the team's attempts to raise sponsorship from the chief executives of steel and cement companies. They got goodwill, he said, and no money. The Nest I/O, the Karachi incubator, then took them into its fifth cycle after they pitched to its president, Jehan Ara, and a panel of judges. The founders called the programme a mini MBA, and the mentoring pushed them towards labour colonies, tourist lodges, health clinics and schools in slums and rural areas as markets.
Saquib also put his finger on the problem that would shape the company's next decade. Most Pakistanis, he said, assume a proper house is brick and mortar, takes a long time to build and costs a lot, and convincing them otherwise is difficult. The paper added that many doubt a flat pack structure is a real house rather than a shelter. Nearly a decade later the company is still making the same argument.
A grant from the UN
In April 2018 Saquib won UN Environment's Asia Pacific Low Carbon Lifestyles Challenge in the energy efficiency category, one of twelve winners across the region and one of two from Pakistan. The prize was a $10,000 grant, business training and the chance to pitch for a further $10,000, ProPakistani reported.
“I'm happy to use this UN Environment grant to bring our technology to more people who need it.”
The money was small, but the endorsement was not. For a company asking a sceptical market to trust an unfamiliar structure, a recognisable international name was worth more than the cheque.
Baby steps
UN Environment followed up with a feature in February 2019, which the company republished. Saquib was 26. He said there had been no innovation in Pakistan's construction industry, that each house cost around $3,000 with a lifespan of about 30 years, and that educating the market would have to happen in baby steps.
Dechen Tsering, UN Environment's director for Asia and the Pacific, called the company's innovation an example of the ingenuity needed to tackle the world's biggest problems, a line ModulusTech still uses in its press kit.
The system behind the house
The technology Saquib leads is what the company calls the InterMesh System, a patented steel frame assembly it describes in its MIT Solve application as taking three or four people about a day to erect without heavy equipment, with finishing in about a week. ModulusTech says the system reduces embodied carbon by around 90 percent against conventional construction, keeps interiors 10 to 15 degrees cooler than the outside air during Karachi's summer peaks, and ships eleven units to a truck. The homes come with utilities pre installed and are relocatable. These are company claims; the about page says the company is now EDGE Advanced certified.
The design logic is that anything which can be cut and drilled in a factory can be assembled by people who are not builders. A kit of parts that fits on a truck and goes together with hand tools removes the expensive part of conventional construction, the skilled labour and heavy machinery, which is why the company talks about affordable housing, school and clinic units and eco tourism cabins in the same breath. The factory is in the Korangi Industrial Area of Karachi.
From prototype to pilot
The numbers have moved as the product has. In 2017 the Express Tribune reported a house costing under Rs 250,000 and lasting up to ten years. By 2019 the company said about $3,000 and 30 years. In its 2022 MIT Solve entry it described a 900 square foot, two bedroom home from as little as $9,000, powered entirely off grid by solar, and said it had built more than 45,000 square feet, had about 350 people living or working in its structures and employed about 20 staff. It also said it was cash flow positive after two years of direct sales and had won a £250,000 grant from British partners. Reall, a housing charity, wrote in August 2021 of funding a pilot of ten net zero prefabricated homes in Karachi for buyers in the bottom 40 percent of the income pyramid, with Trellis Housing Finance providing end user finance and a lifespan claim of over 50 years.
The changing figures do not necessarily mean the claims are wrong; a product that moves from a student prototype to a full home will change in size and specification. They do mean that readers should ask which version of the house a number describes.
Two numbers for the same claim
Earlier company materials claimed a carbon footprint 50 times lower than conventional building, a figure Forbes repeated when it named Saquib, aged 28, with his two cofounders to the 30 Under 30 Asia 2021 list in the social impact category. The company has since settled on the 90 percent figure. The two are not the same claim, and neither number has been independently verified in the sources we found. The company says it also took part in the COP26 climate conference in 2021.
That caution is worth stating in an industry where sustainability claims are often hard to test. A measured, third party assessment of the embodied carbon in a ModulusTech house, set against a conventional one of the same size, would be the single most useful thing the company could publish.
A lower profile than his partners
Saquib keeps a lower profile than his cofounders, and we found no interview with him after 2021. What is on record is the thing he built: a house that leaves a Korangi factory flat on a truck and, by the company's account, is a home by evening.
The questions that follow are the ones any manufacturer of housing faces. Can the factory make enough kits to matter to a country with a large housing shortage? Will lenders and buyers accept a steel framed home as an asset that holds its value? And will the first generation of owners find that the cooler interiors and low running costs the company promises hold up through a Karachi summer? The answers will come from the houses, not from the press releases, and Saquib is the person who has to make them stand up.
