ModulusTech and the house that fits on a truck
Three NED graduates set out to shelter refugees with a flat pack home. The customers who actually paid were schools, farms, a clinic and, eventually, a net zero neighbourhood in Karachi.
ModulusTech began as a final year project at NED University in Karachi. Nabeel Siddiqui, Yaseen Khalid and Mohammed Saquib Malik wanted, as Siddiqui told the Express Tribune in April 2017, to build something tangible that could solve real problems. The problem they chose was shelter for displaced people, and the product was a steel framed house shipped flat and bolted together by hand. The Express Tribune reported that the first one went up in three hours for under Rs250,000, and that the team had been taken into The Nest I/O incubator.
Prizes before customers
The early money came from competitions rather than sales. ModulusTech won first prize in UNIDO's Global Cleantech Innovation Programme in Pakistan in December 2017 and a $20,000 special commendation at the global final in Los Angeles, according to UNIDO. In April 2018 Saquib won UN Environment's Asia Pacific Low Carbon Lifestyles Challenge and a $10,000 grant, and the Islamic Development Bank gave the company a Transformer award in Cambridge that year. Khalid's January 2025 One Young World page puts total grants from the three bodies at $120,000.
Customers were slower. Khalid told UN Environment in 2019 that clients were sceptical, the company went months without orders, and seed investment took a further year and a half to close. Dawn reported in September 2018 that the company sold direct and to order, had won about $40,000 in grants, and was in talks with a local investor at a $1 million valuation. The 256 square foot standard unit then cost about Rs300,000, or about $11 a square foot against $18 or more for concrete.
What actually got built
The refugees the founders had in mind never became the market. By early 2019 the company's completed work, according to Khalid, was an expansion of a nonprofit school, washrooms on a construction site, and staff accommodation for an organic farm, worth about $90,000 in revenue. During the 2020 lockdown it built a Covid screening room for Karachi's Imam Clinic in under ten days for about $4,400, UNIDO reported. A LinkedIn post from around 2022 announced Senja Resort, an eco tourism project at Attabad Lake in Hunza.
The flagship is in Karachi. In August 2021 Reall, a UK affordable housing investor, said it was funding a pilot of net zero prefabricated homes for the bottom 40 percent of earners, with Trellis Housing Finance providing end user loans. Reall described ten homes; the company's own announcement described 19 in a first phase with title ownership for women. ModulusTech's 2022 MIT Solve entry, which reached semi finalist stage, cited a £250,000 grant from UK partners and a $9,000 price for a 900 square foot two bedroom home. A June 2023 Barium Digital interview located the pilot in Shadab Town.
Carbon claims and the question of size
The carbon pitch has shifted. Early coverage, repeated by Forbes in April 2021 when the founders made its 30 Under 30 Asia list, claimed 50 times less greenhouse gas than concrete. Since 2021 the company, Reall and MIT Solve have used a 90 percent reduction in embodied carbon. Neither figure has been independently verified in the sources we found, and the $20 million in Islamic Development Bank funding reported by Forbes and ProPakistani in 2021 is contradicted by the company's own later grant totals. Size has fluctuated too: MIT Solve in 2022 gave a team of 20, while One Young World in January 2025 gave nine staff and more than 150 people housed.
As of October 2026 ModulusTech is still trading, though quietly. Siddiqui was listed as chief executive on a Global Solutions Initiative project page in June 2025, a Pakistani lifestyle site named the company among sustainable brands in April 2026, and modulus tech.com remains live with a factory address in Korangi. The blog has not been updated since March 2023, and we found no funding round, acquisition or expansion announced in 2025 or 2026.
