Digital Nomads: A Ghanaian serial tech entrepreneur who’s finding his place in the UK pet-tech industry

At 30, Freeman Faithful, a Ghanaian serial tech entrepreneur, has lived multiple lives. 

Faithful has been a student, a tech gadget connoisseur, a student (again), a founder, a tech consulting maven, a student (again), a cybersecurity engineer, a founder (again), a builder, and overall, somebody who’s always eager to find the next thing once he’s thrived in a place.

During one of the slow peaks of December, we had a hearty conversation about his life, travels, and the series of businesses that have taken him across Ghana and, eventually, into the UK.

“I’ve always been intrigued by travelling,” he told me. “Not in the tourism sense. I just don’t like feeling boxed in. Once I feel like I’ve seen the edges of a place or a system, my instinct is to ask what else exists beyond it.”

Life in Ghana

Faithful grew up in Ghana, a country and culture which shaped his earliest views, exposure, and instincts. Like many young men raised in West Africa with an aptitude for numbers and logic, Faithful was nudged toward a respectable path early. 

In secondary school, he gravitated naturally toward the sciences, partly out of expectation and partly because he was good at it. Engineering seemed like the obvious destination.

In 2015, he enrolled at KAAF University in Accra, Ghana, to study Mechanical Engineering, believing that fulfillment would eventually catch up with discipline. It never did.

“I’m a failed mechanical engineering student,” he said, laughing. “I was going through hell. I wasn’t feeling fulfilled at all. Every day felt like a different movie. And I just knew that wasn’t it.”

The problem was not intelligence or a lack of effort, Faithful said, describing his time in college. It was misalignment. Mechanical Engineering demanded repetition, patience with rigid systems, and comfort with long feedback loops. Faithful wanted immediacy. He wanted to see cause and effect. He wanted to build something and watch it work or fail in real time, and this nudged his interests toward entrepreneurship.

Even while unhappy in school, he began tinkering.

In Accra, the equivalent of Lagos’ Computer Village is Circle, a sprawling, chaotic marketplace where phones and laptops are repaired, and deals are made with equal parts trust and suspicion. Faithful knew Circle intimately. He knew which vendors were honest, which ones cut corners, and how to spot quality hardware without getting burned. His classmates noticed.

“People trusted me to help them go and swap phones or buy phones because they didn’t want to get scammed,” he recalled. “I would always add my markup on it.”

It started informally. A favour here. A phone there. Then Faithful decided to make it visible.

“I printed a flyer at the school entrance gate with my phone number on it,” he said, smiling at the memory. “I called [the tech repair business] ‘Doctor Android Services’. And business took off. Like mad.”

Students called him for everything. Broken screens. Software issues. Battery replacements. Faithful was not just fixing devices; he was learning how trust converts into demand.

That experience became his real education.

He eventually left Mechanical Engineering behind and enrolled at Venkateshwara Open University, an Indian university with ties in Ghana, to study Information Technology in 2017. Faithful noted that studying how the plumbing of technology works felt like a path that appealed to him strongly.

“I liked it because it was a practical course where you weren’t just learning theory,” he said. “You were expected to build things, fix things, and understand how systems actually work.”

He completed the three-year degree in 2019. Along the way, he picked up skills in design, front-end development, and systems infrastructure. More importantly, technology gave him something mechanical engineering never did: room. After graduating, he joined Melcom, Ghana’s largest retail chain, as an IT lead. There, he encountered scale for the first time.

“I saw what happens when technology touches real businesses with real volume,” he said. “You don’t get to hide behind theory. If something breaks, it breaks publicly.”

Yet, even that environment began to feel limiting. Faithful had tasted independence too early to be fully satisfied with maintenance. His successful ‘Doctor Android Services’ business showed him he already had the entrepreneurial knack; coupled with his design and technical coding skills, he soon craved the “excitement” of building his own thing from scratch. It led Faithful to tech consulting, a business that would soon pull him far beyond Ghana’s borders.

Act 1: Tech consulting business

Faithful launched Peges as a small tech and IT consulting business in Lapaz, Accra, in 2018, while he was still in school. He continued building the business even after completing his IT degree and joining Melcom. Soon after quitting his job at Melcom, he turned his focus full-time to Peges.

At Peges, he was helping companies design, build, and maintain digital systems at a time when many Ghanaian enterprises were still finding their footing online. Faithful was hands-on; he coded, designed, and helped manage some of the biggest digital transformation projects for Ghanaian enterprises.

Faithful was part of the core team that built Melcom Online, the e-commerce platform of the country’s largest retail chain—and his former employer. His firm also worked with Allianz Insurance, Junction Mall, and Shelter Mart, a Ghanaian property listing platform. At its peak, Peges was invoicing over GH₵‎ 3 million ($286,000) across clients in a single year.

Over time, Peges evolved into a full-fledged tech boutique agency, working with startups at different stages, from founders building their first minimum viable products (MVPs) to companies that had already raised significant capital. Some paid in cash; others offered equity. 

“Peges has been my biggest funding source,” Faithful said. “It funded my lifestyle, funded my ideas, funded everything else I wanted to try.”

Peges became more than a business. It brought in deep liquidity that bankrolled his curiosity, his experiments, and his risk appetite. It also gave him exposure and unlocked yet another curious side for Faithful: He was helping early-stage founders to build their ideas and raise capital, yet he wasn’t doing that for himself. He felt he was underselling his value and wanted to build a tech product.

His first attempt in 2022 was BitCarter, a platform that allowed users convert cryptocurrencies. However, that ship didn’t sail; he turned his focus back to Peges.

Yet that early experiment showed him something uncomfortable. Many of the founders who scaled fastest were not necessarily smarter; they were closer to opportunity, said Faithful.

“They had access,” he said. “To investors, to networks, to markets. And most of that access was outside Ghana.”

He tried to bridge that gap. Hoping to travel and widen his surface area for luck, he started applying for visas—including a Schengen visa for which he was rejected.

Act 2: Migrating to the UK

By September 2024, Faithful landed an opportunity to study a Masters in Cybersecurity at Coventry University, UK, after several months of planning and preparations. Before the UK, he had considered the United States and the UAE, both viable locations for their tech and networking ecosystems, but ultimately settled in the UK. There, he secured a passport that allowed him to travel as a nomad.

“[Dubai] is an amazing place to live,” said Faithful. “But in tech, it feels more like where people go to relax once they’ve already made it.”

He had applied to Coventry University, building on his background in information technology and software development. He financed the move through Prodigy Finance, a lender that supports international students, and paid for his flight and other costs himself.

“My experience running Peges gave me a foot in the door,” he said. “Prodigy Finance could see I wasn’t just a student. I had built things.”

He arrived in the UK on a student visa, completed his master’s degree in cybersecurity in November 2025, and now has roughly two years to remain in the country and work under the UK’s post-study framework. Faithful chose cybersecurity because he wanted to build businesses that revolved around compliance and data protection.

For Faithful, Coventry delivered what he had been looking for all along: a clear structure for mentorship and a strategic position in one of Europe’s active tech hubs.

Through the university’s Innovation Hub, Faithful met mentors weekly, refined his business ideas, and stress-tested concepts against UK regulations and market realities.

“It felt like having access to people who would normally charge you a lot of money,” he said. “But they were invested in seeing you grow.”

Today, he works as a cybersecurity infrastructure analyst in the UK.

Act 3: A pet-tech business

Through Coventry’s entrepreneurship programmes, and by mere immersion, Faithful discovered an identification problem in the UK’s pet care industry. While settling into life in the UK, someone suggested dog walking as a way to earn extra income. At first, he dismissed it. Then he looked closer.

“I didn’t realise how organised the pet care industry here is,” said Faithful. “In Africa, we say we love our pets, true. But over here, it’s something different; people insure their dogs. People leave inheritance to their pets. It’s a whole different world.”

Yet he was baffled by the trust gap plaguing the industry. Dog walkers handle animals people love deeply, yet verification is fragmented. Background checks, right-to-work confirmation, insurance, and basic standards are inconsistent.

Walkidoggy was Faithful’s response and his entry point into the pet-tech industry, a growing subset of the UK’s pet care market estimated at $8.5 billion.

At the centre of the operation is WalkIdentity, the parent company Faithful built to solve what he sees as the industry’s most fragile problem: trust. WalkIdentity handles verification and compliance for pet service providers, performing identity checks, background screening, and credential validation for people whose jobs require access to someone else’s home and animals.

Walkidoggy sits on top of that infrastructure as the marketplace layer. It connects pet owners to dog walkers and other service professionals who have already been vetted, turning what is often an informal, word-of-mouth arrangement into something closer to a regulated exchange. Owners can see who they are hiring, what checks they have passed, and what standards they meet before handing over their pets.

As Faithful began walking dogs himself, he paid attention to the small, physical frictions that sat outside the software. One of them was dog stakes, which are used to securely anchor dogs in a place and give them temporary freedom to play and roam outdoors. Existing dog stakes—especially the metallic tie-out stakes with sharp ends sold widely—felt awkward to carry and, in his view, unnecessarily dangerous. He spotted the opportunity by reading customer complaints and observing how often traditional stakes bent, snapped, or injured dogs.

“They looked like weapons,” said Faithful. “And I kept thinking, ‘this doesn’t match how much people care about their pets here.’”

He built EcoStake as a hardware extension of the Walkidoggy brand, built under WalkiGear, his eco-friendly equipment line. During our call, Faithful lifted the prototype to the camera and walked me through it slowly, explaining how it was designed, 3D-printed from composite materials, and registered as a design to prevent easy replication.

Out of the box, EcoStake looks like a T-shaped anchor you could mistake for a harmless garden tool at first glance, until you realise that every part of it has been deliberately softened, rounded, and thought through. It is designed to be driven into the ground without the aggressive, weapon-like sharpness common to metal dog stakes, holding a dog securely in place while reducing the risk of injury to both animal and owner. 

Faithful speaks about it less like a product and more like a correction, a small but careful redesign of something that had long been accepted as dangerous simply because no one questioned it. Priced at £79 ($93) per unit, EcoStake is easily more expensive than regular dog stakes. Yet Faithful believes the quality and value of his product will outcompete incumbents, as he launches an audacious drive to win the UK’s pet-tech market.

Beyond hardware, Faithful is building WalkAcademy, a training arm designed to professionalise pet services further by teaching safety standards and best practices. Together, the pieces form a single system: identity at the core, a marketplace for access, hardware for safety, and education for continuity.

Outside of pet-tech businesses, Faithful has built other ventures in the UK, including a “TikTok for food content,” and a tech consulting business similar to Peges but tailored to British clients. Despite his attention being pulled in a million places, Faithful still manages to build a thriving career in cybersecurity.

As we wrapped up our call, I half-jokingly asked whether he would ever consider pitching EcoStake on Dragon’s Den, the long-running British reality TV show where entrepreneurs seek investment from seasoned business leaders.

He laughed, paused, then shrugged.

“I won’t lie,” he said. “I might do it for publicity.”

Then he went right back to talking about what he wanted to build next, his drive to make things better on full display.