Yaseen Khalid is a cofounder of ModulusTech, a Karachi company that makes flat packed, steel framed homes that small crews assemble on site with hand tools. The company website lists him as chief operating officer, alongside Nabeel Siddiqui as chief executive and Mohammed Saquib Malik as chief technology officer. Khalid is also the founder who tends to explain why the company exists: to house people displaced by disaster.
ModulusTech says its homes carry about 90 percent less embodied carbon than conventional construction, and it has built affordable net zero housing, school and clinic units and eco tourism cabins across Pakistan. Khalid has been unusually frank about how small and slow the early years were, and about how far the company still has to go.
This profile draws on interviews and project pages in which he and his company describe the business themselves, so many of the figures that follow are the company's own estimates. Where an independent source exists, it is named.
A refugee crisis on a screen
Khalid told UN Environment in 2019 that pictures of the Syrian refugee crisis made him rethink why he was in business at all. He was 25, an engineer in Pakistan, and the images brought back the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 floods in his own country.
“Being a Pakistani citizen, I had witnessed the plight of disaster stricken people myself after natural disasters. It was clear to me that a large number of displaced people around the world needed housing.”
Khalid studied civil engineering at NED University in Karachi, where he, Siddiqui and Malik turned their final year project into a flat packed house. The Express Tribune reported in April 2017 that their professors doubted the three could finish in time to graduate. They did, and the first unit went up in a friend's backyard in about three hours.
Months without an order
Khalid told UN Environment that the founders paid for the first prototype out of their own pockets, that clients were sceptical and the company went months without orders, and that it took a further year and a half to raise seed investment. The founders skipped their salaries to get there.
By early 2019 ModulusTech had expanded a nonprofit school, installed washrooms on a construction site and built staff accommodation for an organic farm. Those projects had earned about $90,000 in revenue, generated 25 jobs and saved an estimated 1,350 tonnes of carbon, reaching around 300 people, he said. All are the company's own estimates.
Three hours, eleven houses to a truck
Khalid became the company's voice at award ceremonies. Business Fights Poverty reported in October 2020 that ModulusTech took first prize in Pakistan's Global Cleantech Innovation Programme in December 2017, which helped it find early funding and partners, and that at the global final in Los Angeles it won a special commendation and a $20,000 grant. Gulf News quoted Khalid in November 2018, after another UNIDO round of awards, saying the houses "can be assembled in as little as three hours". UN Environment named him a regional finalist in its 2018 Young Champions of the Earth competition and called him chief technical officer.
In April 2021 Forbes placed him, aged 27, on its 30 Under 30 Asia list in the social impact category alongside his two cofounders. By then the pitch had hardened into a simple proposition: a house that leaves the factory flat, goes on a truck and is a home by evening.
A factory pivots in a pandemic
The same production line proved useful in the first year of Covid 19. Business Fights Poverty reported that ModulusTech built an air conditioned screening room for Imam Clinic in Karachi, which had been testing patients in tents in its car park. The room cost around $4,400 and was delivered in under ten days during a citywide lockdown. Siddiqui told the publication the company was talking to other Karachi hospitals, and the company also designed emergency units for quarantining suspected cases and a conveyor for disinfecting packages.
It is a small episode, but it shows what a flat packed system is for. The same panels that make a house can make a clinic room when a city needs one quickly.
What One Young World recorded
Khalid is a One Young World ambassador, and in January 2025 the organisation published his account of the company. In it he dates the founding to June 2016, says eleven houses fit on one truck, and gives a cost of about $11 per square foot. He says the homes are built to withstand cyclonic winds and earthquakes and insulate three times better than standard housing guidelines, and that the company's buildings have housed more than 150 people while a school expansion gave 100 girls access to education. He credits a conversation with the former Unilever chief Paul Polman at a One Young World summit with sharpening the company's focus on sustainability.
The page is candid about scale. ModulusTech has nine full time employees and has received $120,000 in grants from UNIDO, UNEP and the Islamic Development Bank, plus about $5,000 more from the Momentum Tech conference and Hashoo Youth Entrepreneurship. Other company pages date the founding to 2017, so the beginning of the company depends on whether one counts the project or the business.
Ten homes in Karachi
The most concrete step since then came in August 2021, when Reall announced that it had funded a pilot of ten net zero prefabricated homes in Karachi, designed to be affordable for the bottom 40 percent of earners. Reall said three people can assemble a home, that the homes run off grid on renewable energy with their own water purification, and that they are designed to last more than 50 years, with wind catchers for natural ventilation. Trellis Housing Finance Limited was to sell the homes and offer finance to lower income buyers, and women and disabled clients were to get priority, through partnerships with Spaces and ConnectHear.
The model Khalid says the team is developing is a mortgage that lets refugees and low income families buy the houses on simple terms. It is a notable step. A house that can be built in a day helps nobody if the family cannot pay for it, and a product that can be financed is the difference between a demonstration and a market. The company website now says it is Edge Advance certified, attended the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021, and has saved more than five million kilograms of carbon dioxide, by its own count.
“Never be afraid of the competition. If you are solving a real problem, you will always have a space in the industry.”
The next ten thousand homes
The challenge ahead is scale. A company of nine full time staff, funded in part by $120,000 in grants, is a long way from housing the numbers of people that displacement by floods and conflict represents. A financing product at volume would need a lender, a legal structure that recognises the home as security and a factory that can produce in quantity. A factory exists in Korangi, Karachi, and a lender was named for the pilot, but no larger programme has been announced.
What exists is a credible engineering system, a record of honest reporting about its progress, and a founder who has kept the company's purpose in plain view since 2016. Khalid grew up watching disasters and decided to build for the people they left behind. What the company needs now is evidence that the model can carry thousands of families, not hundreds.
