Wheelhouse Advisors published VC Sonar for Assurance and Compliance, 2026 Inaugural Edition on November 6. The report explores the top emerging providers leading the way on agentic GRC and TRM along the path to Autonomous IRM: eighteen companies, all outside the IRM50, that came through Wheelhouse's public-evidence screen because that evidence shows an agent of theirs performing, or released to perform, assurance or compliance work. Some of those agents execute the work today for named customers; others assist a person or execute without named-customer evidence yet, and each profile says which. Each one carries the VC Sonar Emerging Provider designation, an evaluated inclusion with no tiers, and each has a profile in the report that tells its customers what the agent does, where it sits on the five layers of Autonomous IRM, how long the capability has been in market and what to verify before trusting it with scope.

The eighteen cover all eight Governance, Risk and Compliance and Technology Risk Management solution areas, and the map that places them is the first VC Sonar map for those two segments. It is a visibility tool, not a ranking. Inclusion says that public evidence shows relevance to autonomous execution in assurance and compliance work, and a provider's position says where that work happens, nothing about product quality or commercial standing.