N2N Services Launches Helios, an AI Agent Platform for Higher Education
N2N Services announced Helios, a platform that lets colleges and universities build and deploy their own AI agents on top of existing student information systems. The platform succeeds Illuminate, N2N's API publishing tool that served more than 400 institutions for over a decade.
Helios combines N2N's existing API-publishing capabilities with an AI agent layer. Institutions can connect their Banner, Workday, PeopleSoft, and other systems, then use AI to automate multi-step workflows across those systems with built-in audit trails and compliance controls.
What Helios Does
The platform connects to 17 vendors across 15 domains through a knowledge base of 6,283 vetted endpoints. It uses Claude on Amazon Bedrock to power reasoning steps and the open Arazzo specification to orchestrate agent pipelines.
Every write action requires explicit confirmation, and every agent action traces back to a named, reviewable skill. This design addresses FERPA, GLBA, and SOC 2 compliance requirements that higher education institutions must meet.
First-time users can visit helios.lightleap.ai, describe what they want to connect, and watch the platform research systems and draft an integration pipeline in real time.
Migration From Illuminate
N2N spent two years planning the transition from Illuminate to Helios. The company said it will not strand existing Illuminate customers and will support them through a three-step process: auditing every workspace and API, mirroring them on Helios, and cutting over on each customer's schedule.
Helios becomes the default platform for new institutions starting immediately. Existing Illuminate customers can migrate at their own pace.
Development Timeline
The platform launched 100 days after N2N's 15th-anniversary event in Atlanta. The team wrote more than 3 million lines of code during that period, with CEO Kiran Kodithala personally writing more than 390,000 lines using AI as a co-author.
N2N also moved its Orion fraud-detection engine from a managed service to a SaaS platform and expanded its Polaris student-services product into a general AI and human agent-routing platform during the same period.
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