Nabeel Siddiqui was a civil engineering student at NED University in Karachi when the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, the three year old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean in September 2015, went around the world. In a 2018 essay on the company's website he wrote that he and his friends began researching refugee housing and concluded that shelter was the need nobody was meeting. The answer they sketched was a low cost house that could be transported anywhere and set up within a day.
That sketch became ModulusTech, a Karachi company that manufactures flat packed, steel framed modular homes and structures that small crews assemble on site with hand tools. Siddiqui is its cofounder and chief executive, and has been its public face since it was incubated in 2017.
The company says its homes carry about 90 percent less embodied carbon than conventional construction, and that it has built affordable housing, school and clinic units and eco tourism cabins across Pakistan. Those are company claims. What the public record does show is a founder who has kept a hard idea alive through nearly a decade of small contracts, prizes and grants.
A backyard house in three hours
The three founders, Siddiqui, Yaseen Khalid and Mohammed Saquib Malik, had developed a flat packed steel framed unit as their final year project. One Young World, which profiles Khalid, dates the founding to June 2016. Siddiqui's own essay says the team spent more than a year on a problem with no easy answer before reaching a concept for flat packed modular houses that kept the features of an ordinary home in a smaller transport volume. It put the first prototype at three people, about three hours and $3,000.
The Express Tribune reported in April 2017 that the first house went up in a friend's backyard in about three hours for under Rs250,000. The company was taken into The Nest I/O, the Karachi incubator.
Siddiqui is a civil engineer by training. Beyond ModulusTech, the bio on file says he has worked as a consultant for the Asian Development Bank and as director of product development at Counselling Pakistan, which suggests the range of a founder who has had to learn finance, policy and sales as well as structures.
Pitching for a market that did not exist yet
Siddiqui became the company's chief executive and its public face. Dawn profiled him in September 2018, describing a standard 256 square foot unit selling for about Rs300,000, or roughly $11 a square foot against $18 or more for concrete. One unit took a week to make, and customers ordered a size and had it installed with roofing, fittings and plumbing. The paper reported that the company had won about $40,000 in grants and was talking to a local investor who valued it at $1 million. It had not approached banks.
Siddiqui cited a national shortage of nine million houses. His main targets were displaced people, refugees and low income housing projects, and he said the company was talking to local and international NGOs. Against shipping containers, the usual rival, he claimed lower transport costs, with 11 flat packed units to a truck, and lower energy needs: a test project in Thar, he said, needed one air conditioner where a container needed three. The company's reply to scale was to sell directly and add rent and lease options later. Demand, he said, was not the problem. Capital to manufacture was.
“There is a demand for affordable housing worldwide and we want to capture that.”
That diagnosis explains much of what followed. A factory that makes houses needs working capital for steel, labour and storage before it has a single paying customer, and affordable housing is a hard market in which to find buyers who can pay up front. Some readers of the Dawn piece questioned its per square foot figures, and the paper itself printed them as the company's.
Prizes before profits
The prizes helped. ModulusTech took first place in UNIDO's Global Cleantech Innovation Programme in Pakistan in December 2017 and a special commendation worth $20,000 at the global final in Los Angeles, according to a UNIDO story republished by Business Fights Poverty in October 2020. The Islamic Development Bank gave it a Transformer award in Cambridge in 2018. One Young World's page for the company counts grants from UNIDO, the UN Environment Programme and the Islamic Development Bank at $120,000 in all.
Such awards give a young company credibility and a little cash. They do not replace revenue, and the Dawn profile makes clear that the founders knew it.
A clinic in ten days
When Covid 19 arrived, Siddiqui redirected the factory. UNIDO reported in 2020 that ModulusTech built an air conditioned screening room for Karachi's Imam Clinic in under ten days during lockdown, for about $4,400.
“At ModulusTech, we believe in quick, simple and economical solutions.”
The episode showed what the technology was for. Speed and low cost are not marketing lines for a system built from flat packed parts, they are the reason it exists, and a pandemic gave them a use that housing alone had not.
From one room units to a net zero neighbourhood
The bigger step came in 2021. In an August 2021 post the UK housing investor Reall said it had funded a pilot of 10 prefabricated net zero homes in Karachi, aimed at the bottom 40 percent of the income pyramid. Reall's account is that a crew of three can assemble the flat pack system, that the homes are designed to run off grid with their own renewable energy and water purification, and that they should last more than 50 years. Trellis Housing Finance was to handle sales and finance for buyers, and women and disabled clients were to get priority access. The company calls the project Pakistan's first affordable net zero housing community. Reall did not publish the cost.
In April 2021 Forbes put the three founders on its 30 Under 30 Asia list, with Siddiqui aged 27. In 2022 Siddiqui led the company's MIT Solve entry, titled the world's most affordable net zero homes, which reached semifinalist stage in the Climate: Ecosystems and Housing challenge. The application said the company had built more than 45,000 square feet, had a team of 20 and was cash flow positive. Those figures are the company's own.
Smaller than its press, and still standing
The company is smaller than its press suggests. One Young World's page, which dates from around January 2025, gives nine full time staff and says its buildings have housed more than 150 people. The company blog was last updated in March 2023. The gap between the 20 staff of 2022 and the nine of 2025 is unexplained.
But Siddiqui is still at the helm. In June 2025 the Global Solutions Initiative in Berlin listed ModulusTech as a Young Global Changers project with him as chief executive and cofounder, still promising homes with 90 percent less embodied carbon.
What the next house has to prove
The case for ModulusTech is easy to state: a house that goes up in a day with hand tools is a plausible answer to the need for cheap shelter that Siddiqui first set out to meet. The case against is just as plain, which is that nine years on the company has not published a customer count, a production volume or an audited financial result.
Siddiqui's task is to turn a well decorated pilot into a business that can supply housing at volume. If he does, the idea that began with a photograph in 2015 will have been worth the long wait. If not, ModulusTech will still be a rare example of a student project that became a working factory.
