The successor to N2N’s decade-old Illuminate platform, Helios lets institutions build, govern, and ship their own AI agents on the systems they already run.
ATLANTA, GA, UNITED STATES, June 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
N2N Services Inc., the higher-education technology company behind LightLeapAI, today announced Helios, its next-generation integration and agent platform and the successor to its long-running Illuminate platform. Helios is described by the company as the first AI agent-builder platform purpose-built for higher education — enabling institutions to build, govern, and ship their own AI agents on top of the systems and data they already run.
The announcement also marks the beginning of the end for Illuminate, the turnkey API platform N2N has operated for higher education for more than a decade. Illuminate will be retired with a period of overlap to ease customers into the transition to Helios.
“As Illuminate sets, Helios rises,” said Kiran Kodithala, Founder and CEO of N2N Services. “Ten years ago, we built Illuminate so higher education could finally share its data on its own terms. Helios keeps every promise Illuminate made — fast, secure, turnkey API publishing — and then takes the next step: every API becomes a governed, auditable step in an AI agent pipeline.”
From Illuminate to Helios
Illuminate’s Photon, Wave, and Spectrum products allowed business users — not just programmers — to publish APIs over student information systems such as Banner, Colleague, and PeopleSoft in minutes rather than months, without expensive middleware. At its peak, the platform ran over five hundred (500) live APIs across four hundred (400) institutions, served more than 3 million transactions/day, and delivered compliance-grade uptime for years.
Helios preserves that turnkey API-publishing capability and adds an AI agent layer on top. Where Illuminate published APIs, Helios turns every API into a step in a deterministic, governed agent pipeline that is audited and explainable by default.
Key capabilities of Helios include:
– Connect anything to anything — inheriting every connector N2N has built since 2010, spanning Banner, Workday, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Anthology, Ellucian, custom databases, and REST, GraphQL, SOAP, and legacy XML interfaces.
– Arazzo-native agent pipelines — deterministic orchestration built on the open Arazzo specification, with Claude on Amazon Bedrock powering every reasoning step.
– Audit-by-default governance — every write action requires explicit confirmation, and every agent action traces back to a named, reviewable skill. The platform is aligned with FERPA, GLBA, and SOC 2 standards and governed by N2N’s Integrated Context Control Protocol (ICCP), built on transparency, least-privilege, and auditability.
– A trained API knowledge base — 6,283 vetted endpoints across 17 vendors and 15 domains, each described in plain English so agents can find and use them.
– A no-signup guest experience — first-time users can land on helios.lightleap.ai, describe what they want to connect, and watch Helios research systems and draft an integration pipeline live, with inline signup when they are ready.
The platform is organized around seven pillars: Connect Anything to Anything, Agent Dashboard, Agent Studio, API Builder, API Logs, Admin Console, and Guest Experience. Unlike traditional annual software releases, Helios ships weekly, with every change published in a public changelog.
A migration two years in the making
N2N said it will not strand a single Illuminate customer. The company has spent two years planning the transition through a three-step process — Audit, Mirror, and Cutover — inventorying every Illuminate workspace, API, scheduled job, and integration partner so that nothing is sunsetted without a defined successor. Helios was built API-first to match Illuminate’s surface area, providing Photon, Wave, and Spectrum workloads with direct equivalents.
“N2N fully commits to supporting our existing Illuminate customers through this transition period with no impact to their existing services. We look forward to showing each of them the unique capabilities of Helios to unlock the potential of their integrations in this AI-enabled age,” Kodithala said. “Transition happens on the customer’s schedule — not ours. Helios becomes the default for every new institution starting now.”
Quantum Leap After Effects
Helios arrives on the 100th day after Quantum Leap, N2N’s 15th-anniversary gathering at the Coca-Cola Roxy in Atlanta. Over those 100 days, N2N’s team — including CEO Kiran Kodithala and a small alpha group of team members the company calls Omnia Builders — wrote more than 3 million lines of code, more than 390,000 of them by the CEO himself with AI as a co-author. Through multiple sprints, the team reshaped N2N’s product line, moving its Orion fraud-detection engine from a managed service to a SaaS platform that deploys in minutes instead of weeks, expanding its Polaris student-services product into a general AI/Human agent-routing platform, publishing its chat experience to the iOS and Android app stores, and bringing the Omnia AI device from concept to working prototype.
About N2N Services
N2N Services Inc. has spent 15 years building the connective tissue of higher education — the integrations between student information, finance, document, and transcript systems that keep institutions running. Today more than 500 institutions run on N2N’s platform. The company’s fraud-detection platform has helped stop more than 1.8 million fraudulent applications and protect over $1 billion in student aid. Helios is a product of LightLeapAI, built and operated by N2N Services Inc.
For more information, visit https://www.n2nservices.com/helios/ or try the platform at https://helios.lightleap.ai.
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Press inquiries: https://www.n2nservices.com/contact/#press
Kiran Kodithala
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Meet Helios — the AI agent platform built for higher education
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