For the third quarter running, shareholders in Blue Owl's technology lending fund have asked for close to two-fifths of their money back. For the third quarter running, they will get a fraction of it.
Blue Owl Technology Income Corp., known as OTIC, told its investors on Friday that estimated requests to sell shares back to the fund in the quarter to 30 September came to about $1.1 billion, or 39 per cent of the shares outstanding. That compares with 38.1 per cent in the second quarter and 40.4 per cent in the first. The fund will buy back 5 per cent of its shares, about $135 million, and share it out pro rata. Each shareholder who asked to sell will be able to sell about 13 per cent of what they asked.
The letters, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, were Blue Owl's quarterly update on two non-traded business development companies, funds that lend to companies, most of them backed by private equity firms, and are sold mainly to individual investors through financial advisers. Neither trades on an exchange. The only regular way out is a quarterly tender offer, capped at 5 per cent of the shares.
The better news, at the bigger fund
At Blue Owl Credit Income Corp., or OCIC, the much larger of the two, the picture has improved. Investors asked to sell $3.1 billion of shares, or 16.8 per cent, down from 18.8 per cent in the second quarter and 21.9 per cent in the first, when requests peaked. OCIC's 5 per cent buyback, about $900 million, will cover roughly 30 per cent of each request.
Added together, investors asked the two funds for about $4.2 billion this quarter, down from $4.7 billion in the second and $5.4 billion in the first. Blue Owl said most of the requests at both funds were resubmissions: shareholders whose earlier requests were only partly filled, asking again. At OTIC, unfilled requests lapse, and the FAQ it published says they "must be resubmitted in any future quarterly tender offer window". The next one is expected in December.
The resubmission point cuts both ways. It means fewer new investors are heading for the door. It also means the queue is made up of people who have wanted out since the start of the year and are still waiting.
What the queue looks like from inside
OTIC spelled out the arithmetic. A shareholder who tendered in all three quarters this year will, after the third payment, have received about 35 per cent of what they first asked for in the first quarter. In all, OTIC will have paid out about $446 million in six months. At OCIC, the equivalent figure is about 60 per cent, or $2.8 billion.
Returns help explain the difference in demand. OTIC's Class I shares, which carry no sales charge, returned -0.21 per cent this year to the end of August, and 2.88 per cent over 12 months. OCIC's Class I shares returned 4 per cent this year to August. Both funds pay monthly distributions at an annualised rate of about 9.2 per cent on Class I shares, and both have returned about 9 per cent a year since they started.
OTIC lends mostly to software and technology companies, the borrowers that investors worried this year would lose business to artificial intelligence. Blue Owl rejects that reading of its loans. "These results underscore the disconnect between the market's fears of AI disintermediating software and OTIC's resilient credit fundamentals," its letter said. Loans not paying interest were 0.3 per cent of the portfolio's fair value at the end of June, and the fund says its borrowers' revenue and earnings are growing by high single digits.
No forced sales
Both funds say they can pay without selling loans. OTIC reported $1.2 billion of available liquidity at the end of August, nearly nine times this quarter's buyback, and more than $500 million of loan repayments this year. OCIC reported $11.2 billion, more than 12 times its buyback. Both are running with less borrowing than their own targets, and both point out that 98 per cent of their loans pay floating rates, which rise with the Federal Reserve's. The letters cite the Fed's quarter-point increase in mid-September and the possibility of another before the end of the year.
That is the contrast with Metrics Credit Partners in Australia, which last week stopped processing redemptions in its unlisted funds altogether after its auditor would not sign its accounts. Blue Owl's funds are paying what their rules allow. The rules allow 5 per cent.
OCIC said more than 90 per cent of its 90,000 shareholders remain fully invested. At OTIC, where nearly two-fifths of the shares are in the queue, the question for December is whether the line gets shorter, or the same people simply join it again.
Tender request figures, fill rates, liquidity, portfolio statistics, returns, distribution rates, leverage and the quotations attributed to Blue Owl are from the October 2026 shareholder letters and tender-offer FAQs of Blue Owl Technology Income Corp. and Blue Owl Credit Income Corp., filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as exhibits to Forms 8-K on 2 October 2026. The funds describe the third-quarter request figures as preliminary and subject to adjustment. Combined quarterly totals for the two funds and the comparison of fill rates are this publication's calculations from those letters. Accurate to 5pm ET on 5 October 2026.
Topics marketsprivate creditsoftwareartificial intelligence
