Fifteen years of building. One platform that matters.
LightleapAI is built by N2N Services Inc., founded in 2010 around a single insight: in higher education, every problem is a data problem, and every data problem is an integration problem. That insight became Illuminate, and Illuminate became the foundation for LightleapAI — the AI platform now used by 500+ institutions across the country.
Higher education runs on legacy systems and human heroics. We replace the heroics with intelligence.
Colleges and universities are the most consequential institutions in the country, yet most of them run on software designed before the cloud. Our job is to bridge that gap: integrate the legacy stack, layer modern AI on top, and give institutions the tools to protect students and the funding behind them. We do not sell features. We sell outcomes.
An AI-native institution by 2030.
Within five years, every meaningful workflow on a college campus — admissions, financial aid, advising, document processing, transcript exchange, fraud review — will be agent-mediated. LightleapAI is building that future. The page you are on right now exists to tell you who is behind it.
Leadership
A small team with over 100 combined years inside higher education — operators who built the systems, sold to the institutions, and ran the IT shops we now serve.
Kiran Kodithala
Founder & CEO
Kiran founded N2N Services in 2010 after years as an enterprise architect at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Notre Dame, where he saw firsthand how integration debt holds higher education back. He built Illuminate — the first iPaaS designed for colleges — and now leads its evolution into LightleapAI, used by 500+ institutions. Named a 2022 Georgia Titan, he hosts the Illuminate Higher Education podcast.
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Chad Strunk
Sr. Vice President of Operations
Chad spent 15 years building and securing the IT backbone at Dunwoody College of Technology in Minneapolis before joining N2N in 2021, climbing from Solutions Architect to Senior VP of Operations. He brings deep operator instincts — process re-engineering, infrastructure resilience, and the discipline of having actually run a campus IT shop — to N2N's delivery organization. MBA from the University of St. Thomas; BSCS from the University of Minnesota.
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Danielle Whitney
Vice President of Strategic Alliances
Danielle leads N2N's partnerships with the platforms that anchor higher education — Ellucian, Boomi, Anthology — and the system integrators that deliver them. She spent a decade as a product manager at Nolij Corporation building forms-processing software for colleges, moved to Lexmark when it acquired Nolij in 2012, and has been at N2N since 2017, rising from Director of Integration Solutions to her current role in 2021.
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Tom Gavin
Vice President of Sales
Tom joined N2N in 2025 to lead sales for LightleapAI after more than a decade selling payment and integration solutions into higher education — most recently as Principal New Business Developer at Ferrilli, where he was a multi-year President's Club honoree and three-time Ellucian Live presenter. He focuses on community college systems and the institutions hit hardest by enrollment fraud.
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Six principles. No exceptions.
- 01
Purpose
Our shared purpose thrives because respect drives our intention.
- 02
Independence
Group think has an end point. Vibrant, independent thought has endless possibilities.
- 03
Shared ownership
We are committed to a shared stake in the outcomes that matter.
- 04
Leadership
We value the power of listening. We value leadership at all levels — as one.
- 05
Collaboration
Our culture of collaboration goes beyond shared email. It includes the partners whose commitment to working together co-creates a vibrant tomorrow.
- 06
Cultivation
Talent can be outsourced; commitment and excellence cannot. We cultivate from within — our team, and the students whose success we exist for — through learning, career pathways, and real-world experience built into our products and our internship-powered workforce.
Our impact on the industry.
We hire engineers, designers, and operators who want to build the next decade of higher education software.
If you have shipped real software to real institutions and want to do that at the scale of an entire industry, we should talk. Send us your work.
Reach outOur Origin Story
Celebrating the steps that led to the leap.
- 2010
Founded N2N Services
N2N Services was founded with a vision to build reliable integration solutions for modern organizations. As this vision evolved, it led to the creation of Illuminate, an N2N product designed to simplify and secure system integrations. Illuminate enables organizations to seamlessly connect applications and manage APIs at scale. It represents N2N's commitment to innovation, reliability, and long-term value.
- 2015
Gartner Recognition
Gartner recognizes N2N Services as a Cool Vendor for Education. N2N has also been identified in Gartner's Hype Cycle for Education as specializing in exostructure, which 'enables institutions to leverage industry (and other) best-practice services from the cloud, rather than having to bring them inside the campus walls.'
- 2016
N2N's Flagship Product Launches
Illuminate becomes synonymous with API integration across higher education institutions. N2N's Illuminate Platform is an innovative integration software suite that allows business users to configure APIs, setup security profiles, transform data field name, and configure data translations.
- 2018
Ellucian Partnership
N2N Services Inc. becomes an Ellucian Alliance Partner. Ellucian is the world's leading provider of software and services that power the essential work of colleges and universities.
- 2024
LightleapAI Takes Flight!
Comprehensive partner discussions led N2N to develop end-to-end security across institutions of higher learning safeguarding applications, student-information-services, and document intelligence across AI-driven solutions.
- 2025
500 Partner Institutions and Counting!
LightleapAI's explosive market launch catapults N2N over the 500 customer threshold across the country. Expanded partnerships with flagship and legacy providers like Ellucian position N2N and LightleapAI for expansive and sustainable future growth.
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