Monteverdi's father owned a garage and truck business in Binningen, an environment that shaped his early enthusiasm for machinery. At the age of seventeen he built his first car, the Monteverdi Special, from the remains of a wrecked 1949 Fiat; the car is now preserved at the Swiss Transport Museum in Lucerne. After his father's death in 1956 he took over the family repair shop. In 1957 he acquired the Swiss Ferrari franchise, which the Monteverdi business operated for eleven years, while adding dealerships for Lancia, Rolls-Royce, Bentley, and later BMW.
From 1956 he began building racing cars under the MBM initials — initially standing for Monteverdi-Basel-Mantzel, after German tuner Dr Mantzel who collaborated on early Formula Junior cars powered by two-stroke DKW engines. After a falling-out with Mantzel, Monteverdi partnered briefly with German driver and tuner Gerhard Mitter before ultimately renaming the enterprise Monteverdi Binningen Motors.
In 1961, with new 1.5-litre Formula One regulations in effect, Monteverdi adapted one of his Formula Junior chassis to take a Porsche RSK engine. Porsche declined to sell him an engine directly, so he purchased a complete RSK car, extracted the unit, tuned it to produce approximately 150 bhp, and installed it in the strengthened MBM tub.
The car made its sole competitive appearance at the 1961 Solitude Grand Prix on 23 July 1961. Monteverdi qualified last on the grid and ran for just two laps before retiring with a broken engine. The team had also entered the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, but on the way to the race Monteverdi wrote off the car in a serious accident during a non-championship libre event at Hockenheim. The crash effectively ended his driving career, though he was fortunate to survive.
In late 1989, nearly three decades after his first F1 venture, Monteverdi purchased the Onyx Formula One team. Onyx had been founded by Mike Earle and Joe Chamberlain and had achieved a breakthrough third place for Stefan Johansson at the 1989 Portuguese Grand Prix — its best ever result — under the Moneytron sponsorship of Belgian financial figure Jean-Pierre van Rossem. When van Rossem fell out with Earle and Chamberlain and forced them out, he quickly lost interest in the team and sold it to Monteverdi, whose son-in-law became a driver with the team. The cars retained the original Moneytron colour scheme with new decals applied over the old ones.
The Monteverdi Onyx period was brief and unsuccessful. Without viable engine or sponsorship arrangements, the team managed only a handful of underfunded races in 1990 before collapsing. A byproduct of the association was the Monteverdi Hai 650 F1 sportscar, reportedly sold in six copies through to 1994.
Alongside his racing activities, Monteverdi produced a series of high-performance GT and luxury cars under his own name from the late 1960s. The Monteverdi 375 used a 7.2-litre Chrysler V8 engine in a Monteverdi-designed chassis, with bodies by Italian coachbuilders. A 4-door saloon and a sporting 400 model were also offered, along with a mid-engined 450 shown in 1971. The oil crisis of the early 1970s curtailed production. A later venture produced the Tiara, a luxury saloon based on Mercedes-Benz mechanicals, around 1985.
Monteverdi died from cancer on 4 July 1998 in Binningen, in an apartment directly above his car-assembly workshop. He was 64. His private collection, housed on three floors of 4,000 square metres and comprising some 70 Monteverdi cars, remained accessible to groups by appointment.