By Matt Wirz

Investors in two of Blue Owl Capital's flagship private-credit funds asked the firm to return $4.7 billion of their money in the second quarter, a drop from the previous quarter.

Withdrawal requests amounted to $3.6 billion, or 19% of shares outstanding, in the firm's largest private-credit fund. Requests for its technology-focused fund came to $1.1 billion, or 38% of the fund.

In the previous quarter, investors had requested a total of $5.4 billion from the two funds, which amounted to 22% of the bigger fund and 41% of the technology-focused fund.

Blue Owl opted to cap redemptions in both funds at 5%, a built-in feature intended to prevent having to liquidate the fund's hard-to-sell corporate loans to meet withdrawals.

Shares of Blue Owl were up around 3% in premarket trading.

Private-credit funds have been contending with a surge of redemption requests since high-profile defaults last year sparked worries about the health of their investments. Withdrawal requests at Blue Owl remained higher than other big private-credit funds despite the slowdown in the second quarter.

Blue Owl has become a closely watched barometer for the health of private credit because it was one of the first fund managers in the industry to raise money from wealthy individuals, quickly boosting the funds it managed to about $300 billion. Now its reliance on retail clientele has become a liability, as withdrawal requests threaten the firm's fee revenue.

Redemption requests have picked up elsewhere across the industry in the second quarter, hitting firms like Ares Management, Blackstone and BlackRock and weighing down their stocks. Share prices dropped even further in late June after investors in a big fund managed by Apollo Global Management asked for 17% of their money back, up from 11% in the previous quarter.

Executives have said the worries about private credit are overblown, but that they expect redemption requests to remain elevated for some time.

Blue Owl's largest fund has $11.6 billion of cash, cash equivalents and borrowing capacity available, equivalent to 12 quarters of payouts at the 5% threshold, the firm said in a statement.

Write to Matt Wirz at matthieu.wirz@wsj.com