Your units at landed cost, every line documented and no margin added, and a fixed yearly subscription that reserves capacity and a lead time at any hub your product is qualified for. The subscription is where Moduloa earns.
MOD-01 · Manufacturing · Stage 0, pre-revenue
From your design to your customer's door.
You release the design. Moduloa is designed to buy every part, assemble, flash, test and pack it, and ship it to your customers, for as long as the product lives. Each unit would be billed at landed cost with no margin added; Moduloa would earn on a yearly subscription for the capacity and lead time you reserve.
The proposed system
Stage 0NowPublished modelsNext10–20 interviewsLaterFirst pilot
- On the record
- 36dated, falsifiable predictions
- Tracked
- 44humanoids, 15 makers, sourced
- Published
- 28research notes
- Customers
- 0so far, nothing has shipped
The position
Made where it is needed.Not for cheap labour.
Humanoid robotics and physical AI will reduce the labor-cost advantage of low-wage regions. That moves the question of where things get made away from wages, toward design, energy, logistics and proximity. But a production qualification still stops at the site boundary. If it could travel, the routing software would matter more than owning the building.
Near the material first, near demand over time. It is on the record twice, ten years apart: P-07 (2036) takes wages out of the decision, then P-16 (2046), "Supply chains are shorter; production sits close to final demand." Neither is proven.
The model, end to end
- QuotingCHEQUER 01
- Production blueprintsJACQUARD 02
- RoutingWAYBILL 03
- SuppliersPYX 04
- ExecutionJACQUARD 05
- Quality & logisticsTOUCHMARK 06
- LearningTOUCHMARK 07
Each phase is built by one of five projects, all on one shared foundation, the factory OS. See the open tasks →
How you pay
The margin lives in the membership, not the unit
| Line | What it is | Moduloa's margin |
|---|---|---|
| Your unit | Landed cost, every line documented | None |
| The subscription | Capacity and a lead time, by the year | Here: the only line Moduloa bills you directly |
| The framework | Paid by the hubs, its own line where it reaches your price | In certification, the OS, deployment and routing |
| Delivery | Arranged by Moduloa, freight and duty at cost | None |
The fourth opacity · the currency line
| Treatment | Uplift | Source of the rate |
|---|---|---|
| Rate taken as 1.00 | 13.80% | ECB reference, 2026-07-29 (1.1380) |
| Rate fixed and never refreshed | 11.59% | Fixed 2025-01-13 at 1.0198 |
| Three stacked conversion hops | 2.72% | Nordea published 0.90% margin |
| An FX buffer inside the markup base | 5.00% | Illustrative: we cannot source it |
The currency figures are re-derivable from one free, archived endpoint: ECB series EXR.D.USD.EUR.SP00.A. For scale: Sanmina earned 8.81%, Plexus 10.08% and Benchmark Electronics 10.16% gross margin in FY2025.
The evidence
The premise, tracked weekly
Four KPIs a reader can check (price, availability on a 0–4 ladder, verified customers, units in field), with the source URL kept on every claim, and rejected claims logged alongside accepted ones. It is a tracker, not a verdict, and it is CC BY 4.0 so it can be argued with.
Humanoid maturity index · Moduloa’s model, as of 2026-10-02
10.1% of the way to humanoids that could run a Moduloa hub
| Dimension | Reading today | Weight | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verified paid work | 5 of 30 verified customers, 16.7% | 35 | 5.83 |
| Units in field · leader | 8,400 of 1,000,000, 0.8% | 30 | 0.25 |
| A price you can pay | no maker with verified paid work publishes one, 0.0% | 25 | 0.00 |
| Openly on sale | 6 of 15 makers at rung 4, 40.0% | 10 | 4.00 |
| Humanoid maturity index | 100 | 10.1 | |
100% is defined, not felt: five dated claims set it, and the marks, the price gate and the weights are Moduloa’s judgement, not a finding.
How the index is built
100% is defined, not felt, and it is built from five dated claims in the register, P-01, P-03, P-05, P-20 and P-21. One condition comes straight from them: every verified customer relationship is paid industrial work, which is P-01’s “not pilots, not demos”. The rest is ours. The register names no unit count, so 1,000,000 machines in the field for the leading maker is Moduloa’s mark; it makes no claim about order channels, so “all 15 tracked makers sell one you can order” is Moduloa’s too. The price axis is a gate rather than a scale: it scores 0 while no maker with verified paid work publishes a price at all, and if one ever does the build stops for a person to judge, the snapshot records paid work per maker and prices per model, so it cannot say whether a price belongs to the machine doing the work. Those two marks, that gate, and the four weights are Moduloa’s judgement, not a finding. Every reading is a field in the snapshot this section links to, recomputed on every build.
Who is winning the humanoid race
| Stage | What it means | Who is there |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Openly on sale: public price + order channel | Unitree, AgiBot, 1X, Fourier, Kepler, Booster + EngineAI |
| 3 | Paid work at customers: real revenue | Agility Robotics, Figure AI, UBTech |
| 2 | Unpaid pilots at real customer sites | Boston Dynamics, Apptronik, NEURA, Sanctuary |
| 1 | Working demo in the maker's own lab | Tesla, XPeng |
The research
A deep-researched note most weeks. Six questions run through them, and the thesis turns on one: can a qualified production process move between robot cells owned by two different companies? The nearest dated test, P-27, is due 30 June 2027 and still open.
The work went to the integrators. The money went to the factories.
US computer programmer jobs fell 30.5% in three years and entry-level roles are 4.5% of software postings, while forward-deployed engineers gain share. The money went elsewhere: Micron's quarterly revenue rose almost fivefold at an 86.8% gross margin, and GE Vernova has nearly six years of gas turbines on order.
ReadSomeone has to own the hall
Daedalus, a contract manufacturer that ran its own AI-automated machining hall in Karlsruhe, entered insolvency in August, two and a half years after raising USD 21 million to scale it. In the same weeks Isembard, which mostly signs up machine shops other people own, reached 16 listed sites and opened a 160,000 sq ft building of its own. A network does not remove the fixed cost of a factory. It decides who carries it.
ReadMonthly recap: September 2026
September 2026 in review: four notes, and the month the framework turned up beside the work rather than inside it. Measurement, standards and the setup bill, and where the 29 claims stand.
ReadOn board
Every lasting endeavor keeps a manifest of who stands behind it. Moduloa's work is five projects on one shared foundation, and every open task is on one board with a plain test for done. Name a task, what you will deliver and a date no more than three months out. Once it is accepted it is on the record with your name, and a first commitment takes the next number. Seats 001 and 002 are aboard.
CHEQUER: quoting
Every line counted in the open, with no margin added.
See its tasksPYX: supplier qualification
Tested once against an independent standard, so no customer has to test it again.
See its tasksWAYBILL: supply chain routing
Every route chosen by one published rule set, and written down with its reasons.
See its tasksJACQUARD: the assembly floor
The same blueprint and the same jigs, so a part made at one hub fits at another.
See its tasksTOUCHMARK: APIs and the unit record
Every unit marked, and traceable to how it was made.
See its tasksCHARTER: the shared foundation
One data model that all five projects read and write.
See its tasks