More than cuckoo clocks: Black Forest pioneers from wall plugs to AI

When people think of the Black Forest, they think of cuckoo clocks, the Bollenhut and Black Forest gateau. All true – and yet only half the story. The same region where farmers built clocks in winter has produced companies whose inventions sit in almost every home today, drill through the rock beneath the Alps or turn a sentence into a picture.

I think there is a reason for that. For a long time the Black Forest was far away from everything: long winters, steep slopes, small farms. Anyone who wanted to live here had to help themselves – helping yourself turned into tinkering, and tinkering into precision engineering. Clockmaking taught the region a craft that thinks in tenths of a millimetre. Five companies show where that has led.

hansgrohe in Schiltach: from a three-man workshop to a global brand

On 15 June 1901 Hans Grohe founds a small workshop for spun-metal goods in Schiltach in the Kinzig valley – three people making, among other things, parts for clocks. It grew into one of the best-known brands for taps and showers. In 2026 hansgrohe celebrates 125 years, and the company is still at home in Schiltach.

You can go there, too: At the Aquademie in Schiltach an exhibition tells the company's story, and there is a museum about water, bathrooms and design. Admission is free, and if you like you can even try out the showers. The half-timbered little town of Schiltach is worth the trip anyway.

fischer in Waldachtal: the wall plug from Tumlingen

Artur Fischer, born in Tumlingen in 1919, starts a one-man business there in 1948. One of his first inventions is a flash that fires at the same moment as the camera shutter – he sells it to Agfa. He becomes famous for something much smaller: on 7 November 1958 he files the patent for the plastic expansion wall plug. Before that, craftsmen set wooden blocks into the masonry; ever since, a piece of nylon has held the shelf on the wall.

Over his lifetime Fischer files more than 1,100 patents and utility models, among them the fischertechnik construction kits that whole generations used to play engineer. He dies in 2016 at the age of 96. The company is still based in Tumlingen, which now belongs to the municipality of Waldachtal.

Herrenknecht in Schwanau: tunnels for the world

Strictly speaking, Schwanau is no longer in the Black Forest but in front of it, in the Rhine plain – but you can see the forest from there, and the story belongs here. Martin Herrenknecht sets up on his own with an engineering office in Lahr in 1975. In 1977 it becomes Herrenknecht GmbH, and in 1980 it moves to Schwanau-Allmannsweier, where it is still based today.

What gets built there is hard to imagine: tunnel boring machines the size of houses that work their way through rock and mud. For the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the longest railway tunnel in the world, four Herrenknecht machines bored more than 85 kilometres of tunnel. Today around 5,400 people work for the company worldwide.

Prior Labs in Freiburg: AI that understands tables

Now the story jumps into the 21st century – and still stays in the Black Forest. At the University of Freiburg, the team of computer science professor Frank Hutter develops an AI model called TabPFN that makes predictions from tables – exactly the kind of data companies work with every day. In 2024 Hutter founds Prior Labs in Freiburg with Noah Hollmann and Sauraj Gambhir, and in 2025 the research is published in the journal Nature.

What happens next is fast even by AI standards: in May 2026 SAP agrees to acquire the company and announces it will put more than one billion euros into Prior Labs over four years. The company is to carry on independently, in Freiburg too.

Black Forest Labs in Freiburg: pictures from the Black Forest

The second Freiburg AI company has the Black Forest right in its name. Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann and Patrick Esser are among the researchers behind Stable Diffusion, one of the models that made image AI accessible to everyone. In 2024 they found Black Forest Labs, and in August 2024 their first model, FLUX.1, comes out – it turns a sentence into a picture.

In December 2025 the company raises 300 million US dollars at a valuation of 3.25 billion. That makes it one of the most valuable AI companies in Europe – headquartered in Freiburg.

What this has to do with cuckoo clocks

More than you might think. A cuckoo clock is a small marvel of cogs, bellows and weights, built by people who had time and ideas in winter. hansgrohe started out with clock parts, Artur Fischer was a tinkerer through and through, and in Freiburg today there are researchers doing with computing power what the clockmaker did with file and brass: building something nobody thought possible before.

So the Black Forest is both, gateau and AI.